Aceinthewest

When the belly starts to round out on the bottom, making buttons and zippers impossible to be done up.

Waddling, not just because of the soreness in her pelvis, but also because of the sheer weight she’s carrying.

When her spine starts to curve and create that arch from the weight of her belly.

The first “I’m stuck” because she sunk too deep into the couch and can no longer rock forwards to get up.

The faces she makes when feeling kicks and flutters. Some painful and some mesmerizing.

When she’s just big enough that the sink is out of reach.

The creases between her round belly and hips that you want to just grab onto and dig in.

The way her hips widen and her thighs soften as her body adjusts to the new weight.

The way people can’t help but stare anytime she’s out in public because she looks like she’s going to give birth any second.

The protective arm you put around her shoulders or the absent minded belly rubs you give while around other people. It’s clear you did this to her.

When she tries to reach top cabinets or shelves but her growing belly begins to knock stuff over in the process so you need to step in and help grab things.

When sex requires lots of repositioning and new poses but it’s sooo worth it.

When the best advice you’ve been given to help kickstart labor is to “cum it out”.

Driving to the hospital and even though her belly is tense and tight, it’s still so large that it hangs between her thighs.

Watching her cute little nose scrunch as she’s pushing for dear life (she’s doing so well).

BITE stands for Behavior Control, Information Control, Thought Control, and Emotional Control.

The more points a group “scores” on the model, the more of a cult it is.

I think this model is the best one for several reasons:

It’s more nuanced than “cult” or “not cult” and doesn’t make false equivalences between groups

It’s versatile, applying to groups big and small, and cults of all kinds, religious, political, financial, etc.

This is a great example of Thought Control used by cults whenever they’re confronted with criticism.

ALL DOGS ARE PRECIOUS.

It is a weapon

look, when i was a kid i was passionately in love with the idea of robots--that humans would one day create another sort of intelligence to share our world with-- and believed very firmly that we should respect and protect all our robot friends from the start, so there would be no violent humans-against-robots revolution or anything.

anyway it turns out that the people trying to keep end-stage capitalism running are really banking on us feeling more love for the robots than for the kind of people they're going to be using the robots to oppress.

so like. maybe lets all agree right now that if a robot is being used to hurt a person, you need to smash the fucking robot. they're going to make the robots really cute. they're going to show us so many movies about how much robots need to be loved. and then they are going to use robots to hurt people.

Boston Dynamics publicly condemned the project for using its robot “in any way that cpromotes violence, harm, or intimidation.” The day after Spot’s Rampage debuted, Boston Dynamics rolled out a partnership with the NYPD.

Anyway, I have seen these robot dogs in person at a conference, and it took under a minute for my brain to go "Doggo! Friend shaped!" When I stepped back and thought about it, it was unnerving as HELL.

the type you'd need for this is heavy, expensive, unwieldy, without practice you are just as likely to hurt yourself more, and genuinely at the end of the day you are not going to break this with a hammer.

forget "hammer == best way break technology"

if you wanna fuck up technology you get a can of expanding foam. it's small, incredibly easy to carry/conceal and it WILL fuck up any technology WAY MORE than even an expertly wielded hammer hitting every weak point every single time.

The first lion is asking for comfort because she was given a big spook!!! and she needs mommy to tell her it’s safe and ok!!!! (What’s cuter is that mommy clearly reassures her, and goes on to take the parent role of ‘deal with the scream rat in order to protect my large and easily frightened daughter’)

I love how Endo just gave 0 fucks when it came to naming these characters.

It wasn’t passed because people spoke out against it. People called and emailed their senators. So, CALL / EMAIL YOUR SENATORS. MAKE IT KNOWN THAT WE DO NOT WANT THIS BILL TO PASS!

“But its unconstitutional-“ There’ve been multiple bills passed before that are unconstitutional. This will not be any different to them, they do not care.

STOP KOSA!!!

& if your rep is Dem: Remind them, please, that LGBTQ+ content - heck, SEX ED content - is considered obscene by the GOP membership, & maybe consider that keeping kids & teens from accessing either of these things is one reason your GOP colleagues are so eager to collaborate on this bill??

if your rep is GOP: Remind them that realistically, sites that host ‘adult’ content will likely have to collect & keep records of legal IDs, & data breaches happen *on the regular*? Do they know anybody who’s had their identity stolen? How excited are they for the day their *own* browsing habits are exposed by a data breach?

Remind them all that they might trust their opposite-party colleagues, but they *don’t* trust the opposite party any further than they could throw them, and think about every possible bad-faith interpretation of the bill before voting ‘yes’, for fuck’s sake??

The first published study about climate change (that I am aware of-- feel free to point out if there's an older one) is an 1896 paper by Svante Arrhenius. He pointed out the link between the greenhouse effect and changes in atmospheric CO2.

Plate tectonics, which the geoscience community now recognizes as near indisputable, was a fringe theory until about the 1960s.

I'm sorry, have you seen NATURE???

and there's so many more species than this that exhibit homosexuality, varying genders, etc. SO! MANY!

it's very much a natural thing. it always has been. unfortunately, while homosexuality is found in many species, homophobia is only found in one

Do not use Discord to host your files. Do not rely on Discord to preserve your text. DO NOT RELY ON DISCORD FOR ANY KIND OF PRESERVATION OR HOSTING!!

It CAN be lost, it WILL be lost! You must consider Discord as a part of the Core Internet, controlled by one company that hosts the servers.

I thought it was impressive at first that it replaced IRC, but now I am horrified. If the company behind Discord went under today, how many friends would you lose?

How many relationships? How much writing?

You may think this won't happen, but I remember when AIM went down and along with it, entire novels worth of interaction with my oldest friend.

IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU. IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN. NO COMPANY IS INFALLIBLE.

[Image ID: A screencap of a Facebook text post. Original facebook post by Robert Reich on 2/16/2023. Text reads: “Friends,

I don’t know about you, but I look at the next 20 months leading up to the 2024 presidential election with some dread. I’m dreading the next 20 months because the entire process of selecting our president has become so fraught, divisive, and arbitrary that it threatens the foundation of our democracy.

So today I want to share with you a little political hope. Something doable and practical that could even have a positive effect on next year’s presidential election.

A bit of background: About 80 percent of us have effectively become bystanders in presidential elections. That’s because most of us live in states so predictably Democratic or Republican that we’re taken for granted by candidates. Presidential elections now turn on the dwindling number of “swing” states that could go either way, which gives voters in these states huge leverage.

In 2020, Biden owed his Electoral College victory to just 42,918 votes spread over Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin. In 2016, Trump owed his Electoral College victory to 77,744 votes spread across Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

Contrast these slim margins with the results of the national popular vote. In the last five elections, candidates who received the most popular votes nationwide led their opponents by an average of 4.9 million votes — more than 100 times that of the razor-thin battleground wins.

The current state-by-state, winner-take-all Electoral College system of electing presidents is creating ever-closer contests in an ever-smaller number of closely divided states for elections that aren’t really that close.

These razor-thin battleground margins also invite post-election recounts, audits, and lawsuits — even attempted coups. A losing candidate might be able to overturn 43,809 votes with these techniques. On the other hand, overturning 4.6 million votes would be a nearly impossible task.

As such, the Electoral College system combined with the dwindling number of battlegrounds presents a growing threat to the peaceful transition of power.

And it’s become more and more likely that candidates are elected president without winning the most votes nationwide. It’s already happened twice this century.

The Electoral College is an anachronism that should be abolished. But that would require a constitutional amendment, which is almost impossible to pull off — requiring a two-thirds vote by the House and Senate plus approval by three-fourths of state legislatures.

There’s an alternative. We can make the Electoral College irrelevant by getting our states to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Don’t let that mouthful put you off. It could save our democracy. The Compact will guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes nationwide without a constitutional amendment.

How does it work?

As you know, the Constitution assigns each state a number of electors based on its population (that is, the number of its representatives in the House plus two senators). The total number of electors is 538. So anyone who gets 270 electoral votes becomes president.

Article 2 of the Constitution allows states to award their electors any way they want.

So all that’s needed is for states with a total of at least 270 electoral votes to agree to award all their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote.

If they do that, the winner of the popular vote would automatically get the 270 Electoral College votes needed to be president.

This movement to do this is already underway. 15 states and the District of Columbia have joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, agreeing that once enough states join, all their electoral votes will go to the popular vote winner.

Together, they have 195 electoral votes. So we just need a few more states with at least 75 electors to join the compact and it’s done.

Popular vote laws have recently been introduced in Michigan [15 electors] and Minnesota [10 electors], which would bring the total to 220.

Naturally, this plan will face legal challenges. Many powerful interests stand to benefit by keeping the outdated Electoral College in place.

But if we keep up the fight and get enough states on board to reach 270 electors and withstand the predictable legal challenges, America will never again elect a president who loses the national popular vote. No longer will 80 percent of us be effectively disenfranchised from presidential campaigns. No longer will a handful of votes in “battleground” states determine the winner — inviting recounts, audits, litigation, and attempted coups that threaten our democracy.

If you want to know more or get involved, click the link in the comments to read about the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. If you agree with me about the importance of this initiative but your state has not yet joined up, please contact your state senators and reps and urge them to get on board.”