my favourite thing about leverage is how careful it is to place blame exactly where it lies. sometimes i can’t even believe this show managed as many seasons as it did because it is so blatantly anti-capitalist. but as an example of the care leverage takes, “the low low price job,” where they take on value!more aka walmart. by having hardison fully address the fact that his nana was able to feed everyone on a tight budget because of value!more, the episode takes the onus of responsibility off of the the people who are forced to shop there (and work there, for that matter) and right back onto the company for taking advantage of poor people and shitty economies. it’s brilliant really. especially because it’s something i’ve tried to explain to people before (i.e. voting with your dollar is a fucking shitty skewed system in a society where some people have vastly more dollars than others) and leverage just slips it in. what a good show.
And I don’t mean like attractive cute, I mean like baby otter cute. What if the stumble upon us and go “ohhhhh my god!!! Oh my god!!!! I’m dying this is- look at it! Look at them!!! Oh my god!!!”
We usually imagine having to come up with some Devils trade or unholy arrangement to get tech and trade with aliens, but the instant they see us the aliens immediately set out into conservation efforts. They’re like “their habitat is becoming harsh and unlivable for them! We have to save them!” And everyone just puts a picture of us next to this information and they all agree “Look at them! We have to save them!!” We become like the panda mascots of intergalactic conservation efforts.
Simultaneously, our main export is just streams, videos, holograms, and photos of us. Aliens lose their composure completely over videos of us sneezing or yawning or eating pop tarts or playing video games or taking care of our kids.
There are lines of aliens who would LOVE to have a human in their home or on their ship. It’s a little condescending (we’re not sure if we’re guests or well treated exotic pets) but still a good opportunity, and any human who wants can go to space at any time basically for free or even for profit, and the aliens will go out of their way to give you anything you ask for.
There are obvious downsides. We struggle to be taken seriously. While it’s usually shut down pretty quickly, every once in a while some alien group sees the demand for us and tries to start an illegal trade. But at the same time, it’s neat that somewhere out there is an alien (or usually a LOT of aliens) that would love you unconditionally, find every flaw and idiosyncrasy endearing, be worried about you and do anything they could to make you safe and happy. They work hard to make our planet and our personal lives better and don’t ask for anything in return. They just do it because they decided we are important and worth saving just for existing. It’s an odd relationship, and we’re not always sure what to make of it, but honestly it goes a lot better than we worried alien contact would.
I’m down to be a spoiled pampered alien pet.
It would be a lot easier to get “fixed.”
We’re all a bit confused by the cute human memes, which are usually just pictures of some random human with a phrase in alien cuneiform next to it, but which many of the aliens think are hysterical. Photos of the Lincoln Memorial are particularly popular for this for some reason, and it’s a little unsettling to see the alien spaceships with pictures of Lincoln plastered across their forcefields, saying “g+gnor’gax!” and the humor just doesn’t translate at all.
I mean, it’s not bad, exactly. Just…odd. And fortunately alien music is mostly outside our hearing range, so the sad commercials with the interstellar equivalent of Sarah McLachlan broadcasting over them, explaining how the humans are suffering at this time of rotation just look like a rather puzzling montage of normal people. It’s just the aliens get so sad when they see it and their temporal glands leak and it’s…well, a little messy.
School teaches you that ignorance is shameful, rather than being a person’s default AND ENTIRELY FIXABLE state. Sucks the fun outta learning, if you let it.
I may have posted something to this effect before, but it bears repeating if so: This is a marvelous way of looking at the world, and may be one of the best lessons Randall Munroe has ever taught us. It certainly prompted a change in my own behavior. “You’re one of today’s lucky 10,000″ leads to a lot more fun in life than “What do you mean you don’t know about _____?”
Common sense is something you learned so long ago that you forgot learning it, and it’s extremely regional.
Fat people are most likely to suffer weight-based abuse from family members and doctors. Not co-workers, or kids at school, or comedians, or internet trolls. Family members and doctors. Let that sink in for a bit.
Let’s talk about how many fucking notes this has where folks are literally telling about how emotionally abusive the people who claim to love you are when it comes to fat bodies.
Like. Wow.
And don’t forget the APA literally said “stop the diet culture shit cus it doesn’t work”
*walks into bar* *sits in a booth with ppl in it* dont yall love being cis? i love to be cis, its good. (whispering to small lizard under the table: what do cis people drink? milk? you said milk?) yall got milk at this bar?
a neurotypical: intrusive thoughts... does that mean you like... think about killing people... are the Demons telling you what to do... is it Dark In There
my shit brain: ooh ee ooh ah ah ting tang eat that cardboard
Sorry to break in with this on a very much Sherlock-only kind of blog- I promise not to make a regular thing of this, but this is something that’s happened TWICE now.
This is Beyli. He’s a two-month old foal and he’s adorable. He belongs to a friend of the family.
So adorable, in fact, that a member of the public spent a nice afternoon feeding him. You feed the ducks and that’s ok. right? It’s a nice thing to do.
They fed him turnip. He choked and gave himself a stomachache as a result.
The problem is that horses can’t really burp and horses can’t vomit. Their digestive systems are fine-tuned and when they go wrong, they go really wrong. Colic in horses is difficult to treat and in Beyli’s case, like many others, proved to be insurmountable. With pain medicine not working, after 4 hours of doing their best with no improvement, the vet called time on his suffering rather than let him go on to a very slow and painful end.
A horse needlessly suffered and died because someone fed him the wrong thing. They weren’t necessarily malicious, they were just hugely ignorant. And worse, they were hugely entitled. There were already signs asking people not to feed the animals. As I said, this has now happened TWICE to the same family, and they’re by no means alone.
PLEASEDon’t feed horses that don’t belong to you.
Horses can have disorders, diabetes, allergies and dietry requirements and you have NO IDEA if what you’re giving them is acceptable or not. Even ‘safe’ things like carrot and apple could be ‘wrong’ for this particular horse. Grass clippings? Not okay. Grain? Not okay for a horse that hasn’t been regularly eating it.
Don’t assume. i have seen walkers pull up random plants and offer them over the fence INCLUDING TOXIC, DEADLY weeds like ragwort. I’ve seen horses offered dog-biscuits and bread. I’ve heard of horses being regularly fed by strangers thinking they were being under-fed, when the horse in question was on a vet-given diet to control weight and other conditions.
Don’t feed horses that don’t belong to you even little treats and things like sugar cubes because it gives them bad manners. They start biting and harassing people. It’s bad for their teeth and too much sugar is terrible for them.
In some places if the owner has liability insurance, if you can be identified, YOU will be legally responsible for the vet’s bills. And if you’re thinking ‘well, they’d never identify me’, then that’s besides the point.
Please. You wouldn’t feed someone’s dog without asking, I hope. You definitely wouldn’t feed someone else’s child.
TL;DR: Don’t feed other people’s horses. You can make them SERIOUSLY ill. Treat animals in fields like animals at the zoo: you’re welcome to look, but don’t meddle with their care.
Now, let’s get one thing straight - I am NOT OLD. I’m only 47. That’s NOT old.
But kids, there’s clearly some things you don’t understand.
Waaaaaaaaaaaay back in the early 90’s, there was Bill and Hillary Clinton. And these folks was liberal. Radically, radically, liberal. And they did something that nearly gave poor Pat Robertson a complete heart attack. They advocated that ……get this……
……………….that gay people were NOT HORRIBLY EVIL MONSTERS.
Look, folks, you just don’t get it. There was no Ellen, or Rosie, or Neil Patrick Harris, or George Takei. I mean they were alive, but no one knew they were gay. Most of the openly gay people were dead.
I’m older than my friend @thewitchway. Every word she says is truth. I’m thrilled that the young generation has forgotten these things, that they live in a world where celebs have always had the choice of coming out. Where it wasn’t a death knell to their careers as well as a jail sentence. But when you wonder why Hillary has the voting record she does, when you wonder why she’s “wishy washy” and “flip flopping”, you have to remember, she grew up in the times we did. When LGBT people were at best pitied and at worst hunted.
When I grew up, it wasn’t uncommon for a child who dared to mention that they might be LGBT have done what happened to me. I was institutionalized at 12 and given ECT, commonly known as shock therapy. All to cure me of my being a ‘deviant’. See, I’d read about Stonewall and other things in the papers and that made me too bold. So I let them think the treatment worked. Until trying to pretend that I wasn’t what I was made me try to kill myself at 14 and then came out again at 15, this time to being kicked out of the house. Being homeless and ‘relying on the kindness of strangers’ (and yes, that does mean what you think it means), was an improvement over shock therapy at least.
I’m old. But I’m not as old as Bill and Hillary. Or many other now-LGBT supportive liberals. They changed their minds. They learned and they grew and yes, they flip-flopped. Thank god! She went from, gee maybe LGBT people are just people and shouldn’t be persecuted and hurt, all the way to full and equal rights and I 100% support LGBT people. Fan-fucking-tastic! People can grow. People can change. New data, new experiences create new opinions. That’s the way the world’s supposed to work for most people.
Not like it did for old fossils like Thurmond and his cronies with the “southern strategy”. Not like it does for the current “small government” “drown it in a bathtub” neo-conservatives like Reagan and the now-mainstream Republican & Libertarian parties. Not like it does for the cackling cartoonishly-evil capitalists like GHW Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Trump. These people glomp onto an idea and hold it in their teeth like a bulldog. They learn nothing that doesn’t already fit into their predetermined world-view. They are not people who change or admit their mistakes. Someone who can’t admit a mistake isn’t someone who I want their finger on the damn red button.
Hillary is the scariest thing in the world to your right-wing bubba-luvin’ redneck redstate voter out there: she’s a feminist, f*g-lovin, n-word-lovin’ liberal flip-flopper. She changes her mind when a better idea comes along. She can be persuaded with data and facts and a changing world. That’s scary to people who think that maybe pop-tops on their beer cans instead of pull tabs is taking the environmental revolution a bit too far.
When people tell you that “Oh no! Hillary supported DADT and DOMA”, you should say, yes she did. Those were revolutionary ideas of the day. And she was right there supporting them. And now, with the new times, new data, and new political environment, she supports full rights for all LGBT people. In less than 20 years the political environment has changed THAT MUCH! Isn’t it amazing! I’m with her! I want a President who changes with the times. Who views the constitution as a living document. Who isn’t afraid of looking ‘wishy-washy’ and so sticks to outdated opinions so as not to appear changeable.
I want Hillary because a Smart Woman with the political clout and practicality to get things done is the best choice we’ve been offered in a long time. It’s time for her to be not just the lesser of two evils, but the enthusiastic choice of the liberal electorate.
At least 90% of the ‘bad things’ you hear about Hillary can be traced right back to the Republican smear machine that has been attacking her since her husband ran for office. Do you remember the whole “baking cookies” thing and the “stand by her man” thing and the “pantsuit” thing? I do. She was lambasted for EVERYTHING she did or said or wore. She didn’t stand a chance. Except she was strong and sure and stuck it out through horrible smear campaign after worse smear campaign, even when they’d attack her daughter. This is a woman that Putin won’t be pulling the strings on. Can you say that about Trump? Are we ready to turn our government over to the Russian mobsters who have bled their own country dry?
For gods sake, please do the research. Don’t just believe the right-wing smear campaigns. Is Hillary perfect? No. Was Bernie? Honestly? No. At the end of his campaign, things were starting to peek out from him that were less than savory. No politician is going to be ideologically pure and stand up to micro-scrutiny. They’re human beings. Again, thank god. I don’t want our country run by anyone who can’t change. Who isn’t human. Who hasn’t made mistakes (and learned from them.)
Remember that “therapy” I had when I was 12? Trump and his supporters think it’s an okay thing to do. Still. In this day and age year of our lord 2k16. ECT is making a comeback as an “effective” therapy for mental illnesses. It’s no stretch for these soulless people to do it to “cure” their LGBT children. The Republican platform supports “conversion” therapy. Remember that your deciding to stay home on election day is what will have some LGBT child medically tortured because their parents disapproved of their “lifestyle”.
Please read what my friend has written. Read what I’ve written in this post and in so many others. If you are really looking to improve the rights of humanity, voting for Trump, voting third party, or abstaining isn’t the way to go about it.
Register while you still have time. Look into absentee voting. Make a commitment to vote if you are at all able. There are organizations and community centers and churches who will help you. Please. This is your future. My children’s future. I’m gonna be dead and gone before the ramifications of a Trump Supreme Court are felt. But you won’t be.
Vote. Campaign if you can. Donate if you can. But at the very least, VOTE BLUE NO MATTER WHO. The lives of those less fortunate than you depend on it. The lives of those who are considered ‘less human’ than you depend on it.
I am reporting this because THIS IS SO FUCKING IMPORTANT!!!! (Yes, I just said “fuck”, which I don’t do terribly often, but this is THAT important.)
I am 33. I was a child during the Clinton presidency, a highly intelligent and precocious child (I watched the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union with a rapt attention that most young children don’t possess.), sure, but still a child. What everyone above me has said is true, about the attitudes, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, all of it.
I also grew up in a small Southern town, and still live within an hour of where I grew up. You can’t spit without hitting a church or a Dollar General. My parents, unusually, were not particularly religious (though I nearly got sucked into fundamentalist Christianity as a teenager, but my upbringing to question everything won out in the end), but there is still a subtle homophobia in some circles.
If you are under 30, you have little idea how MUCH people (Including, but not limited to, the Clintons) have evolved in their views, and are willing (myself included!) to admit that their views have changed beyond anything they thought possible. If you are under 20, you have no idea how much things have changed, and God, if you are under 15 (and I, due to the nature of my job, work with some pretty frickin’ amazing teenagers), I don’t know how to begin to explain how much has changed.
No matter how little you think it affects you, no matter how little of a difference you think it makes to you personally VOTE, and for the love of your deity of choice, vote Democrat. It’s too important not to.
Seriously, guys.
Y'all know me. Auntie Z. Angry queer mental patient.
I was the first out bisexual girl in my entire school of ~2000 kids way back in 1998. I’ve had to learn a lot of queer theory myself in the past decade, because I was ten years old when William Jefferson “Bubba” Clinton came into office.
I’m 90% sure the only reason nobody cared about my queerness was because I had an established boyfriend and we were both firmly entrenched in the actually existing nerd subculture at our school, and I had the bullying scars to prove it.
I’m statistically tall and was not nearly as pudgy, and three years earlier everyone remembered me getting in zero trouble for throwing an entire desk halfway across the room, because I’m a She-Hulk who has always been angry. Between that and the radical pushes made by the Clintons, I came out because I felt like I had nothing to lose-
Except the opportunity to serve my country in the military, like three generations of my family. Or teach school. Or join the FBI. Any kind of civil service, basically. I knew I couldn’t live a lie, though, and things were starting to come around.
By the time Clinton’s presidency was ending in 2000, I was all lined up to go to school and study public relations. I’m a writer, you’ve all seen me. I was going to start off in corporate and help things advance until I could write policy, because I had hope that things would push forward and I could eventually serve my country, like my elders on both sides.
Then the fucking vote got split, Bush II became president, and my hope was utterly destroyed for nearly a decade.
Don’t you stay home. Don’t you sit out. Come with me and let’s dance with the ones that brung us, or resign yourselves to being pushed backwards and losing sixteen interrupted years of progress.
There is so much YES in this post, but as someone who served in the United States Coast Guard from 1985 to 1990, I am just going to focus on one thing:
supporting both the passage of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in 1993 and its repeal in 2011 is in no way, shape or form a “flip flop”, because it was never intended to be anything but a compromise and a transitional measure.
“Let’s try this thing, give people time to get used to it, time to see that the whole thing isn’t going to fall apart, time to understand that who sleeps with whom doesn’t have any bearing on who you can count on when the shells are falling.”
Yes, it required non-heterosexual members of the armed forces to remain closeted, but it did away with the investigations and witch hunts that were part of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. You could be reasonably assured that you could STAY in the closet unless you CHOSE to open the door, and that was a HUGE advance.
But it was never, NEVER meant to be a long-term solution.
reblog this post with a cool animal species lets make a wholesome thread
ok ill give a headstart:
i really like leopard seals
axolotls are p rad
I LOVE THOSE
potoos look like muppets and i ove tem
here’s a quokka it’s like someone decided to splice together a wallaby and a teddy bear they literally always look like a benevolent cartoon
i don’t think you can get more wholesome than that adorable lil seed-eating smiley face. they’re not even like dolphins, cute on the outside and evil on the inside. they’re herbivores about the size of a cat. there is nothing wrong with them.
The Springhaas, or “irl pikachu” as it is sometimes known, is basically a rat shaped like a bunny abruptly caught in the middle of trying to evolve into a kangaroo. This is why they tend to look startled.
This is a dik dik. They are tiny antelopes from southern and eastern Africa–seriously so smol. With teeny hooves and teeny horns and big soulful eyes. And the name is fun to say. It comes from the alarm call that the females make. They live together in monogamous pairs.
Long Eared Jerboa
The adorable mash-up of a hamster, bunny, and kangaroo. Whiskers with no end, ears that put a fennec to shame, and adorability beyond measure!
bringing this back on your dashes
a sichuan takin bull and his daughter
often the color of donald trump’s hair and looking like a cross between a bison and a guinea pig, the takin is actually a bloody big goat-antelope. they have splendid noses, a natural smile, and share their habitat with pandas. which should be good enough for anyone.
This is an okapi. They are related to giraffe, can lick their own eyeballs and kind of always look like you just asked them for a ride to the airport but look at those ears and the little striped legs ~(*^*)~
Chambered nautilus! A living fossil! I also love axolotl though.
A cinnamon bear! Actually a member of the black bear family, they’re one of the more calm species out there. We also have matching hair <3 Enjoy this one with a heart on its chest!
Capybaras! They’re the largest cavy species,(cavies are animals like guinea pigs) They’re BASICALLY a giant golden retriever in the skin of guinea pig.
Tapir! They’re the horse’s weird cousin. The babies are all spotty like this, but the adults tend to be all one color. They’re just as snuffly, tho.
I'm bleeding money and time, constantly, but believe me, I'm grateful that I can buy a good pair of boots.
“When he was a little boy, Sam Vimes had thought that the very rich ate off gold plates and lived in marble houses.
He’d learned something new: the very very rich could afford to be poor. Sybil Ramkin lived in the kind of poverty that was only available to the very rich, a poverty approached from the other side. Women who were merely well-off saved up and bought dresses made of silk edged with lace and pearls, but Lady Ramkin was so rich she could afford to stomp around the place in rubber boots and a tweed skirt that had belonged to her mother. She was so rich she could afford to live on biscuits and cheese sandwiches. She was so rich she lived in three rooms in a thirty-four-roomed mansion; the rest of them were full of very expensive and very old furniture, covered in dust sheets.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
Whenever someone makes a feminist criticism on the internet there’s always a guy who says “you must be fun at parties.” Hate to break it to you pal, but the guy at parties who’s frothing over SJWs and quoting South Park like it’s scripture isn’t exactly coming off as a bon vivant.
I have a downright disturbing ability to recognize practically anybody who ever guest-starred on Babylon 5. To the point where the boyfriend often checks for that first.
i’m one of those annoying people who’s always like “omg i know that actor from somewhere omg i recognize them whAT WERE THEY IN” when watching tv shows/movies who then proceeds to look it up on their phone and inform everyone that said actor was an extra in an episode of some stupid 90s sitcom once
annoying? that’s a goddamned sport for me and @nehirose. except backwards - we’ll be watching one of the crime shows that EVERYBODY has been in at some point - law & order (any flavor), csi (any flavor), ncis, first 48, cold case - and be like “hold on that person with three seconds of screentime, that’s somebody. who the fuck is that? pause it and tell me the episode name” because it’s always like a decade old episode so they look different and we’re like OH HOLY SHIT IT’S $CELEBRITY.
the other day we managed EVEN THIS in a weird sort of inverse? watching fear and loathing when sven, the very gay bellboy, is checking thompson into the hotel and shans goes HOLY FUCK IS THAT STABLER??
AND IT GODDAMN WAS. FROM THE YEAR BEFORE SVU STARTED.
i have seen that movie so many times and watched so much SVU and never clicked on that
what i’m saying is that this isn’t annoying it’s a magical fucking game that enriches your life.
That’s also me and @kbwagers. We’ll be watching something and have to STOP EVERYTHING to go down an IMDB black hole to find out who this little bit actor is and why we recognize him. Sometimes graphs and flowcharts are needed.
The rare times I’m NOT jumping onto IMDB, my husband notices and pokes at my habit by saying not-so-innocent things like “Huh, that guy looks familiar, what else has he been in?” and I’m like “YOU ASS, NOW I HAVE TO LOOK” and boom I’m on IMDB for hours telling him about the ridiculous shit everyone in the episode has been in that we may or may not have even seen
Feminism didn’t teach me to hate men, but it did teach me to stop prioritising them over women.
And it turns out a lot of men think that’s the same thing as hatred.
I said it once and I’ll say it again. Instead of claiming to not hate men, think about why so many people think you do.
This is literally an explanation of why.
Men grow up in a world where men are always more important than everyone else. Refusing to go along with this and actively prioritising women feels like hatred to men who conflate their unearned position of power with their identity.
Maybe instead of obediently supporting the status quo, you should put some critical thought into why so many men get irrationally angry when women want to be treated fairly.
my fav trope is like, nonhuman characters not understanding human needs/customs but still being super supportive of their human companion
“look what I found while exploring this planet’s surface!” “kilrak please I’m trying to sleep” “ah yes your human circadian rhythm. *stage whispering* I am supposed to be quiet during this time in your rhythm, yes?”
“the book I purchased on ragnok V says humans require physical touch when upset. therefore, I shall engage in a ‘hug’ with you.” *supremely awkward five-armed hug ensues*
*human sneezes* “OH MY GOD SIL'EEN GET THE MEDIC OUR HUMAN IS DYING”
“this pamphlet I received recently says that humans require companions and packmates in the form of small earth creatures. you should have told me this before we departed earth, but it is no worry. we will have to stop at the next trade planet to get you one of these ‘cats’ or ‘dogs’.”
