the prettiest drowned rat

Im mainly thinking of Marshall’s early career, before he became the first Black Supreme Court Justice. He was a traveling attorney for the NAACP, and won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he took against the Supreme Court, including ending “Separate But Equal” doctrine via Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and resulted in a ruling that segregation was unconstitutional.

He was a master of using the words of the system against itself to force it to lose by its own rules, often being able to use existing sociological data to prove the ways that Black people were not just being discriminated against, but were being disproportionally harmed by segregation. He was responsible for releasing a large amount of legal shackles placed on Black people in the US as a whole, though he did focus hard on school desegregations - in part because he had been rejected from schools on account of being Black himself, including Maryland’s state law school.

This is obviously a brief summary, but this is the kind of person trans women need fighting for us specifically right now. Who knows the fucking pains of how we are treated and the horrific segregation, discrimination, and danger trans women face personally. The system aint gonna *save* us but having people do their best to toss a wrench in the gears killing us Officially and slowing things down means even one more person might survive, and even one more person surviving than would otherwise is a win.

Twitch now uses your channel to train generative AI by default.

Opt out here, you're opted in by default

what the fuck

that thing is eldritch

acquired a dark mode version just to see what it’d look like. oh my god. this map is gorgeous

"Biggest" can mean a few things:

The heaviest sword of all time is the 468lb "Le Glaive Chungeuse" of King Louis LXIX, so heavy nobody could wield it.

The longest sword ever made was the Gobai-nodachi, or "quintuple length longsword" forged by Masayoshi Johnson for a ceremony said to have resulted in the deaths of everyone present.

The thickest sword, three feet thick but only six inches long, was the Hungarian Chodesaber, which was used mostly for flattening dough.

The widest sword is currently the Grand Coronation Stub of King Charles, ruler of England as of March 2024. Shaped like a shallow isosceles triangle, its tip is almost 165 degrees.

The most expensive sword ever forged was the Diamond Sprinklesword of Muffy von Fitzwiggle-Plumnugget, which a rich Californian gave to his chihuahua for its third birthday. It could have paid to feed 30 billion people for five lifetimes.

The "biggest" sword in terms of fame and notoriety is the Sword of Damocles, which metaphorically hangs over the head of those with power as a reminder to be responsible lest they grow greedy or despotic. It has not been seen since around November of 2016.

14 years ago when I had recently moved to Alaska, I went hiking with an Aleut friend, and she pointed to a feather lying on the ground and said "hey that's a bald eagle tail feather, you should grab it!" and I was like "uhh I'm very white and that's very illegal" and she went "they're fuckin everywhere up here man. I have 20." so she grabs it off the ground and hands it to me and says "there, now it's a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person."

and I'm like, okay, cool, I guess this is how we do things in Alaska. nice.

so I keep this bald eagle tail feather around for years. display it in my home among other cherished memorabilia from places I've lived and visited, etc.

on a whim, I have just now looked it up. there is no exemption to that law for a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person. the last 7 years I lived in the US, I was technically a bald eagle poacher.

the law against 'picking feathers up off the ground' means that you can't go shoot an eagle then sell the feathers on etsy by saying you 'just found them'. you can't own them no matter where they came from, which makes sure that they're not going to come from any birds killed and then secretly disposed of.