having the power of one Gillette

That’s not problem solving. It’s barely catharsis, in practice. It doesn’t just create more problems than it solves, it destroys more solutions than it creates.

Put the apocalypse down, and back away slowly.

Voting as Fire Extinguisher

When the haunted house catches fire: a moment of indecision.

The house was, after all, built on bones, and blood, and bad intentions.

Everyone who enters the house feels that overwhelming dread, the evil that perhaps only fire can purge.

It’s tempting to just let it burn.

And then I remember:

there are children inside.

TO THROW A WRENCH IN THE BLOOD MACHINE: Five (Season-Appropriate) Metaphors for Voting

by Kyle “Guante” Tran Myhre

VOTING AS PRESSURE ON THE WOUND: After the battle against the killer robots, I become aware that my leg is bleeding. And I know that applying pressure does not, on its own, heal the wound, but it will buy time for the medic to arrive, for the healing to begin.

VOTING AS FIRE EXTINGUISHER When the haunted house catches fire: a moment of indecision. The house was, after all, built on bones, and blood, and bad intentions. Everyone who enters the house feels that overwhelming dread, the evil that perhaps only fire can purge. It’s tempting to just let it burn. And then I remember that there are children inside. 

VOTING AS THIS ONE SMALL THING I’ve tracked the werewolf to its lair, deep in the basement of the old doll factory just outside town. Upon entering, I have the option of flipping the light switch from off to on. Either way, the battle will be difficult. Either way, victory is not guaranteed. But the werewolf can see in the dark, and I can’t. So I will do this one small thing. I will summon what light I can. And I will keep going.

VOTING AS HIGH GROUND, CLEAR SIGHT LINES, AND MULTIPLE ESCAPE ROUTES It’s been said that during the zombie apocalypse, the undead are not the biggest threat, that the real monsters are the human survivors who will hoard resources, betray one another, and fight endlessly amongst ourselves. And it’s true: survival is about so much more than just not getting eaten by zombies. But not getting eaten by zombies is still an important part of the plan.

VOTING AS WRENCH IN THE BLOOD MACHINE Our village has existed in the shadow of Dracula’s castle for years, and has been the site of many battles against him. Now, he’s running for mayor. His platform: rather than turning into a giant bat to hunt his victims one-by-one, he will take control of the village’s resources, its watchmen and bureaucratic machinery, creating a system that will more efficiently identify victims and supply him with fresh blood.

Will defeating Dracula at the polls end his reign of terror? No. But what it will do is deprive him of one specific set of tools that he will otherwise use to hurt people. It will allow us to think offensively rather than defensively, because when the forces of darkness are not knocking on our doors, it frees us up to go knock on theirs.

And yes: there is always more work to be done. There is always more horror beyond that which is right in front of us.

And those who study monsters are right: if we only think short-term, we lose.

But those who fight monsters have taught me: short-term and long-term thinking are not mutually exclusive. We use every tool we have access to, every opportunity to shape the terrain of battle, every advantage we can seize. We don’t split up. We don’t leave anyone behind. We don’t wait for some hero to save us, whether a knight in shining armor or an opposition politician. We fight the monsters. And when the sun rises, we do the work of creating a world in which there are no monsters.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

About two hours later I was permanently banned from r/MadeMeSmile for “self-promotion.”

I accepted that different communities have different rules.But then something even stranger happened.Soon afterward, a moderator from r/pics started going through my account. Not just the new post—many of my older painting posts disappeared as well. One after another. Then I was permanently banned there too.

Maybe it was the same moderator. Maybe it wasn’t. I honestly don’t know.

What surprised me wasn’t even the ban itself. It was realizing how much power individual moderators have over what millions of people are allowed to see. One decision can erase years of posts from a community and instantly cut off your ability to participate, even if those posts had been happily sitting there for months or years.I’m not saying moderators shouldn’t have rules. Communities need moderation.But it does make you wonder where the line is between protecting a community and allowing a single interpretation of the rules to completely reshape what people can share.

The funny part?

I wasn’t advertising anything in those posts. I wasn’t posting prices or asking anyone to buy anything. I was simply sharing my original paintings because I enjoy discussing art with strangers from around the world.

Anyway…

Here’s the painting that apparently caused all the trouble. 🎨

Anyway my friend had some not so nice teeth and during dinner the father of his fwb was like “you work where you work, you sleep with him and his teeth look like that? Get him an appointment.”and then bounced. So his fwb made him an appointment at the practice she managed and my friend ended up needing like 3k worth of dental work and his friend with benefits just gave it to him for free.

It is, by any metric, a small country masquerading as a city.

It governs more lives and more wealth than most nations. If democratic socialism — housing reform, public banking, equitable taxation — functions here, it obliterates the myth that such governance can’t work at scale. The fear isn’t ideological. It’s empirical. Because if Mamdani can keep the lights on, reduce homelessness, and maintain economic growth without catering to Wall Street, then the capitalist gospel collapses under its own dead weight.

What terrifies the establishment isn’t failure. It’s feasibility.

If it works in New York, there’s no reason it can’t work in Nebraska. If it works in Queens, it can work in Kansas City. And once proof exists, belief becomes irrelevant. The ship of democracy, fully refitted, will keep sailing — and no one can claim it isn’t American."

and sometimes they come back when you least expect it, years later, even, and there's this sudden rush of relief like there you are, there you are, even though you barely knew each other.

there's a strange kind of love to it. i don't know you and i want to hold your hand across miles and time zones and oceans. i can still see the imprint of you in this community you left. you don't think anyone will notice or care when you're gone, but we notice and we care and we wish you well.

carrie is almost explicitly about the cycles of abuse. it is almost explicitly about how women and girls are taught to reproduce the patriarchy. it cannot be isolated from either message.

it shows cruel teenagers not as a random whacky plot point but instead to highlight that we are taught to mock other girls for not being fuckable; lest we ourselves be considered not-fuckable. we will eat our own kind to survive. nobody helps her because to help carrie would be to turn against the patriarchy.

carrie's mother has experienced abuse at the hands of her husband and religion not as a "sad backstory" but instead because it lampshades her behavior when she then turns and abuses her daughter while citing that same religion. we are forced to ask the question: what is the difference between the patriarchy and religion? aren't they both systems of control? we often see mothers as being the "ultimate" in innocence and kindness - but this book challenges that narrative. abusive mothers exist, and and always have. abusive women exist and always have. white women, after all, love voting for donald trump.

men are almost absent from the book, but their presence lingers. it feels almost like the red mark made after a slap - the men do not have to be there; the women will continue to abide by the rules without question. it is a devastating, haunting condemnation of the notion of feminine fragility. it accurately asserts that women are cruel, are capable, are power-hungry - and often are hiding behind perceived innocence to mask that cruelty. the abuse carrie experiences rests in a doubled betrayal: it is because of another woman. the supposed "sisterhood" is revealed to be thin, a guise of equanimity that is only offered to the "right" type of girl/woman.

many of us were not the right type of girl.

to go back on these main and obvious themes of the book - to rewrite the mother as some caring and sad creature is... a curious choice. i can't explain it, but it feels almost like censorship to me. it refuses a deeper meaning of the book (and one that questions the patriarchy) in favor of the incredibly thin plot of "what if scary girl had scary powers." i literally don't even know what level of misogyny it is that we have to defang everyone around her in order to tell her story. i'm baffled by it.

in the era of trad wives endlessly posting abusive content of their children online - the adaptation had plenty of meat to modernize her mother. in the era of AI and revenge porn and social media - there's a huge amount of space for a competent writer to play around in. after all, if the abuse is recorded and posted to media - and as the audience we're watching it without interfering - the story is now about us. it asks us who we are comfortable bullying.

it's okay if you feel like you don't have the writing chops to talk about how many religions are abusive and tacitly enable domestic violence. it's okay if you feel like you couldn't write a believable teenage bully. it's okay if you're just interested in "scary girl has scary powers."

as long as you smile and nod, people are satisfied. it’s just to show that you are nice and there with good intentions. we’re small in a big world and have to rely on other people to be decent to us. so we do our little human dance to each other to say, “i’m not here to hurt you. here’s something we have in common, like the weather or sports or itchy sweaters, so we both know we’re on the same team. we both agree on a basic fact, like that it is rainy or that being itchy is uncomfortable, and this proves we can get along. i’m being light-hearted and non-threatening right now.”

small talk isn’t to get to know a person. it’s just a greeting to affirm you’re buddies in the universe.

tech news today is that Mullvad VPN has gone mask-off about being the major funding source for the Swedish Orebro party, who are racist nationalists. unfortunately all discussion of this is occurring on fucking Mastodon instances i can barely load

if you are a mullvad customer (as i am) and want to get out, here is guidance from this guy