Made this post about 15 minutes after the repair guy who fixed the pump on my dishwasher packed up his tools and left, as the dishwasher was whirring along doing my dishes from that morning.
He said the exact same thing, which I did not know before that, so spreading this knowledge.
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Also loved that it actually is Woke Odyssey. Not in a "we cast black and trans actors" way but in a "this is a movie about man's hubris, the disregard for and destruction of social contracts, the disdain with which we treat the living and the dead, the violence we wage against each other, the way we become enraptured with 'great' instead of 'right,' and the way all of that degrades the soul of man" way
“The AP has just posted a detailed investigation into the background of David Brouillette, the recently hired ICE agent who shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine. It’s genuinely horrifying on more levels than are easy to describe. Brouillette was hired during ICE’s recent hiring spree, as the agency attempted to rapidly staff up to manage a program of mass deportation. Brouillette has a long history of severe mental illness, a lengthy history of violence against at least two wives as well as his children, stalking, a seemingly endless list of restraining orders, violent threats against other family members and more. According to one relative, Brouillette was diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder as a child as well as attention deficit disorder, twice tried to commit suicide at age 12 and was hospitalized multiple times. These early issues appear to have been compounded by service in the military and deployments to Afghanistan which left him with an increased propensity to violence as well as PTSD. A relative told the AP, “They took someone who was extremely mentally ill and turned him into a killing machine.””
—
A Must Read and Truly Horrifying Story - TPM – Talking Points Memo
ICE can not be reformed, it must be abolished. These thugs can not be redeemed, they must be prosecuted.
Comments like these are why we should never ever EVER stop talking about the allegations. Because people forget, and apologists and misogynists will use that to downplay the seriousness of the heinous shit this man did to women for decades. And, sooner or later, Gaiman himself will use that to try and make a comeback, which will once again allow him access to a lot of vulnerable people for him to take advantage of.
Don't let that happen. Make it clear to people whenever the topic comes up: Neil Gaiman is a serial rapist with allegations from multiple women dating back to the 1980s. We cannot let people forget what this man is.
Even though everything goes wrong, I love the wedding at the beginning of "Balance of Terror" as this glimpse at just people living their lives in this intensely social/communal environment (more than most later ST tbh) and how pleased they all are to be part of it. But of course, especially for my fave!
So, we get a bit of last-minute wedding prep:
I love that people mostly just wear their uniforms and normal hairstyles, not civilian clothes (both ponytails and elaborate coiffures are entirely normal on the TOS Enterprise!). The vibe is that this is a special but not exceptional event. We'll see in a moment that even the bride just wears her uniform with a floofy head piece.
(It's actually not all that common in TOS to see Federation characters in civilian clothes other than disguises, and definitely not just generic upscale modern dress with jeans or whatever when we do see it—Theiss pretty much always combines the contemporary with something more fancifully futuristic, like with T'Pring's silver upon silver outfit in "Amok Time" and T'Pau's matriarch get-up, Nancy Hedford's very cool 60s-but-also-not lime green patterned deal in "Metamorphosis," High Commissioner Ferris's asymmetrical suit in "The Galileo Seven" echoed in Ambassador Fox's lace-lined get-up in "A Taste of Armageddon," Kirk's snazzy fitted pink-black-white geometric pantsuit for proving his identity in Spock's court martial in "Turnabout Intruder," Areel Shaw's and Uhura's vibrant robes, and of course, the entire diplomatic corps and Amanda's dramatic, layered Vulcan gowns in "Journey to Babel.")
Anyway, I also enjoy that they've clearly just dredged up or figured out how to manufacture a few things for touches like adding the red carpet for the wedding aisle and candle to the religion room here.
I also like that there's a religion room tbh. Like so much of the bland "we've evolved beyond that" utopianism of the Federation, the "we've evolved beyond the need for religion" bro atheism is largely projected back onto TOS from the sanded-down iterations of the 80s versions. But TOS is explicit that the crew is composed of religious people and atheists. It's far from flawless about this (Roddenberry actively repressed specific mention of non-Christian religious practice from the writers, particularly Judaism), but I find the image of a future filled with people from different cultures and religions, including but not restricted to atheism, thrown casually together without problems much more optimistic than one in which everyone just agrees about everything.
A few moments later, when Kirk is beginning the ceremony, this is emphasized btw:
We are gathered here today with you, Angela Martine, and you, Robert Tomlinson, in the sight of your fellows, in accordance with our laws and our many beliefs
I'm also a fan of the open flame and elaborate candle situation! I choose to believe it wasn't just replicated like gemstones or picked up on leave but there's just a hobbyist chandler squad on the ship.
Anyway: Scotty even sets up a camera to record the wedding and transmit it to every viewing screen on the ship and excitedly informs Kirk about this Engineering For Love accomplishment. Also it looks like they got some plants from the arboretum to liven things up <3
Kirk hurries in to officiate, and I'm charmed by his understated happiness about it even with the Romulan situation in the background. He doesn't need to put on a whole theatrical deal here. He just really likes weddings and is happy to be part of one. People should ask him to officiate more of them at random starbases or whatever, honestly, it'd make his day.
Also, adorably, both the bride and groom are nervous. Kirk gives Tomlinson a reassuring little smile and Scotty, who is escorting Angela Martine down the aisle, gives her a big one:
Bones in the background is beaming at the ceremony, and there's a late-arriving blueshirt who seems like she might have been Martine's maid of honor or something who's visibly very happy for her:
Janice Rand, I think, is both happy for the couple but has very complicated feelings about being right next to Kirk at a literal marriage ceremony. I suspect that Kirk, on the other hand, is way too caught up on Wedding Cloud 9 to even be thinking about his own situation beyond Romulan problems:
Janice: I should just be happy for my fellow crew members but my complex and intense feelings for the man 3 inches from me rn who has been very clear that ethically he cannot have a romance with anyone on this ship even though Starfleet has no regulations about it makes all this. a lot.
Kirk: WEDDING!!!!!!!!!!!!
So after a moment of kneeling, our stressed bride and groom get up and look at each other and remember why they're doing all this: they're madly in love is why!
And then Kirk gets to give the speech at the wedding of his children crew members, he's in full Captain Mom mode:
I remember when you came onboard as just these little ensigns! And now you're getting married!!!!
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Namaygoosisagagun First Nation/Collins has burned to the ground. The entire community is nothing but ashes after being quickly consumed by wildfires. They did not have any support from emergency services, and no one offered aid. The community saved themselves by escaping into boats because no one came.
Mishkeegogamang and Cat Lake have lost power. Families are ending up in shelters with nothing. Armstrong, Lac La Croix, Whitesand, Gull Bay, Lac des Mille Lacs are currently in the fires path and all members are being evacuated.
All this loss, all this devastation, and it was entirely preventable.
After steadily underfunding wildland firefighting and purposefully excluding Indigenous wildland firefighters and Indigenous wildfire organizations from wildfire operations, firefighter training, decisionmaking, and resource exchanges, in 2025, Doug Ford slashed the forest firefighting budget.
It's hard to ignore his decision to cut funding and leave us out of adequate fire training (even though we've lived with forest fires for thousands of years—far longer than settlers have been in Canada—and made sure fires like the ones we're all seeing today were prevented through kinisitotēn) when, despite making up less than 5% of the population, we account for 42% percent of all wildfire evacuations in Canada.
And when we are successfully evacuated, we face discrimination and racism—like Kashechewan—because it's always been easier to blame us than it is to blame the true culprit: denialism, corportate greed, and colonization.
The people of Collins and every other impacted community deserve better.
Right now, the AFN is currently accepting donations to help Collins First Nation. If you're able to, please consider donating.
ONWA (Ontario Native Women's Association) is another great place to donate to. They have outreach vans going to motels and inns and offering food, water, resources, and cultural support to those impacted by the wildfires.
Other places to consider donating to are Mikinakoos Emergency Fund, Red Cross, True North Aid, Indigenous Climate Action. You can also send donations directly to Whitesand First Nation via e-transfer ([email protected]) and they request that you add your full name in the e-transfer comment section to receive a tax receipt.
*Before sending money, verify that the appeal appears on an official First Nation, Tribal Council or registered charity channel.
If you can't offer financial support, please consider donating items of need. Moontime Connections is currently accepting drop-off donations. If you live in the Thunder Bay area, Namaygoosisagagun Health Office is also taking in donations! They can also bemailed to Superior Inn Hotel & Conference Centre at 555 West Arthur Street, Thunder Bay, ON, P7E 5P8.
Friendly reminder Ontario, FUCK Doug Ford. We have GOT to vote this motherfucker out the next chance we get. He does not care about anyone in this province but ESPECIALLY anyone who isn’t rich and white like him.
Please donate what you can to the people of Collins and surrounding areas.
in response to people saying things like "men aren't allowed to cry in public, unlike women" other people will then say things like "women are penalized, not rewarded, for public displays of emotion—the fact that women are presumed to be overly emotional & irrational is misogyny, not a privilege"
which is often true but like, it's contextual innit. lest we discount the phenomenon of White Woman Tears
I've recently had white women in professional contexts tell me that they were quote "hurt" and "gutted" by what amounted to very minor professional faux pas on my part. I remember reading a white woman academic's essay on Jane Eyre that began with recounting her emotional upset upon having Jane Eyre "taken away from her" by postcolonial / anti-racist scholarship. white women's emotions do have currency in personal and professional spaces in selective contexts, i.e. when wielded against people of colour 🤷🏽♀️
The intersection of what emotion is allowable and in what context for what intersection of gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation, and age is less a weft weave of who can/can't cry than a tangled cat's cradle with tears punished and rewarded as the strings pull tight.
However, I find myself facinated by this post about white men's tears used to justify imperialism vis a vis veteran homecomings on Facebook when poster was a child.
Partly because when I was a child there were Vietnam vets, who had a very negative (understandably) homecoming for a war most of them were drafted into fighting in the first place.
Anyway, I'm assuming since FB first had videos in 2007, the auto play thing in 2013, but FB stopped being popular with the youths around 2015ish, this refers to US vets on this often US centric site returning from Iraq (or possibly Afghanistan, but more probably Iraq) sometime between 2007 and 2015ish, but most likely 2007-2015.
I'm just trying to...I absolutely believe that there were videos on FB of veterans, most of whom were army reserve who signed up to make ends meet, and ended up in three - four tours in an increasingly horrible situation, returning home to their families, and FB pumping those videos because it's a site (as many of them do) that feeds on pain.
But as someone who yearly has my relatives talk about Pat Tillman dying in that war as a sort of stoic Football-->Military jingoistic symbol, never no mind he was killed by our own military just before (according to contemporary news reports) he was about to start speaking out about how that war was wrong, I'm having trouble grokking this statement. In that set, tears are never valorized, and every Memorial Day same relatives repost pictures of white men carrying a flag draped coffin, despite a disproportionate % of the military being POC again for economic reasons.
I come back to the cats cradle.
White women's tears can and are weaponized. White men may cry, see Kavanaugh at being forced to talk about sexually assaulting a woman before he can be on the supreme court as is his divine right, but it becomes a meme. But he got on the supreme court anyway.
Me when Supergirl convinces the 13 year old not to kill the irredeemable villain because it would retraumatize her: yeah ok fair enough :/
Me when Supergirl kills the irredeemable villain herself the second Ruthye’s back is turned, thus ending the cycle of abuse without involving the terrified grieving child: YEAH OK FAIR ENOUGH :D
I'll always be fascinated by how Spock in "The Conscience of the King" is completely right about everything—something far from inevitable in TOS episodes—but in particular, he is the only character who wasn't on Tarsus IV who seems to emotionally get the full weight of the starvation and genocide.
He doesn't try to minimize or displace what Kirk, Riley, Leighton, and others endured as Kirk's real driving motive. He doesn't close his eyes to the evidence that an almost unimaginably nightmarish sequence of horrors shaped his best friend even though it's painful and uncomfortable to think about him that way. Spock is his usual paranoid jealous self wrt Lenore for about 5 seconds before using his brain, realizing it's fake, and concluding Kirk's real target is likely her father (this is why he discovers the genocide at all). He tries to convince McCoy, does the hard research when that fails, and drums the reality into his head to get him briefly onboard. Spock isn't cowed by Kirk lashing out at him repeatedly, but he also understands that Kirk can't and shouldn't just let it go without his safety and justice assured.
It's obviously much more of a Kirk episode than a Spock-centric one, but Spock is an absolute champ in it.
...That said, I also think having Kirk be the major character whose backstory specifically involves mass starvation and genocide—and in other episodes, shown to very persistently react to hunger/starvation in a visceral way no one else does, and treated as more of an expert on surviving starvation than biologists and doctors—while Spock is the one character who wasn't there and gets it is a truly wild choice when both characters are played by 2nd-gen Ukrainian diaspora actors.
Leonard Nimoy's parents fled Soviet Ukraine separately and had to track each other down in the USA while unable to speak English, and William Shatner's father (the parent who died during the filming of "The Devil in the Dark" btw) had been a teenaged Ukrainian Jewish immigrant from Austria-Hungary to Canada who brought over the rest of his family. Nimoy and Shatner themselves were born in Boston and Montreal (respectively) just before the Holodomor and ~10 years before the Holocaust in Ukraine (CW for pretty much everything); their parents' emigrations spared them from having to survive two genocides to reach adulthood.
North America was no walk in the park for the members of the Ukrainian and/or Jewish diasporas during much of the 20th century, of course (when DeForest Kelley was born, Canada was still actively operating some of the internment camps holding Ukrainian Canadians—incl ones born in Canada—as enemy aliens, and had kept many, many other Ukrainian Canadians under surveillance and more; meanwhile, just listing the USA's and Canada's antisemitic practices in the 40s-60s alone would probably take years). But still, millions of people like Nimoy and Shatner starved and/or were slaughtered where both their fathers had lived: in real life, in their lifetimes.
(Kodos "only" managing to butcher ~4000 starving people before the competence and good will of the Federation's institutions stopped him getting presented as the most successfully, terribly brutal expression of eugenics in recent history speaks more volumes about the better world the fictional characters live in vs the realities of the mid-20th century than "we've evolved past hunger and cruelty :)" ever could. Unfortunately.)
I'm not even sure what my full opinion is on that particular story choice in context, just... huh, sure was a choice.
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So here’s more of what came out concerning the Maine shooting yesterday. The victim’s name is Joan Sebastian Guerrero and they MURDERED him in front of his THREE year old.
And they were rude and yelling at a three year old after MURDERING HER FATHER IN FRONT OF HER.
To all you MAGAts moaning and groaning about “Anti Americanism” THIS is how you create radicals that hate America.
Not to mention they’re retracting their statements from “he tried running over the ice agent” to “he was a threat to public safety”.
okay so the thing is like carol is the only american (and white person) left on the planet. and i think her whiteness and american-ness matters. you are not wrong to say that she is privileged and often selfish and doesn't know what it means to be "independent"
but i also think people on tumblr assume carol has much more control over her situation than she actually does. people act like she's a heinous rampaging bitch when in reality she's a person in an impossible situation. like, for example, the way she behaved on air force one. ABSOLUTELY she was operating on an assumption of american exceptionalism there. but she was also operating on "my wife died in front of me less than 24 hours ago" and "the entire planet is gaslihting me and these other five people." to act like carol's privilege is the only reason the others didn't listen to her is fucking insane. they didn't listen to her because they were also traumatized and grieving and holding on to the only sliver of normalcy they had left
when carol speaks to kisumayu, she is operating from a white savior mindset--but she's also reacting from her conversion therapy trauma. conversion therapy isnt like troubled teen camps where you get randomly kidnapped against your will, most of the time conversion therapy is elective. I think carol sees a younger version of herself in kisumayu: a young girl trying to please her guardians and going along with a scary process that she doesn't understand for the sake of being loved
and she's wrong!!! she's so fucking wrong about kisumayu!!! but she's a character in a tv show who's about to learn and grow
and I don't think that the grocery store scene is as much of carol throwing a fit as some people like to characterize it as. like it's undeniably not the most sustainable move and carol is delusional to think that going to a grocery store makes her independent.
but also I think this scene is trying to show how impossible this fucking scenario is!! no one is independent. no one is an island. carol wouldn't be better off if she was an ultra sustainable hunter gatherer. she cant do everything by herself, no matter her level of privilege, and now the only other person on the entire fucking planet who can stand her is trying to forcibly assimilate her into their hivemind and gaslighting her while doing it. what the fuck would you do if you were in her shoes?
Yeah like yeah Carol’s Americanness and whiteness absolutely affects her viewpoint but when she speaks she’s also speaking as a lesbian who in one of her most important developmental years was sent off to a camp where people who acted super nice and smiled all the time and (probably) told her that once they got rid of her lesbianism she’ll see how much happier she’ll be and she’ll understand why they had to do it. Does that sound familiar? Like how much do you wanna bet “Carol we’re doing this because we love you” was said to Carol by her mother and her conversion camp counselors. This has to feel to Carol exactly how conversion camp felt. And I bet you at that conversion camp there were kids around her who believed it and would tell Carol that they believed it and would say what Kusimayu said at that meeting that she wants to change that she believes the hive when they say that she’ll feel wonderful. I bet you Carol thinks about those kids all the time and what became of them. So of course when she sees Kusimayu this young girl saying all these things saying that this is how she can be with her aunt and cousin again Carol immediately tries to gently explain to her that they’re taking away her individuality that Kusimayu is special all on her own just as she is and that the hive is lying to her. Of course there’s a white savior mindset as part of this but you also can’t erase this grown woman who faced a traumatic threat to her identity as a teenager looking at this other young girl who looks to be a teenager maybe spouting the same words she probably heard from other kids at conversion camp. Of course she tried to talk her out of it.
as someone who has been involved in union organizing through my dad's union since i was literally in second grade, the way that people on tumblr think unions work drives me literally insane
unions do so much more than just strike. unions bargain. unions sit in at meetings with upper management. unions help people navigate benefits. unions coordinate aid drives for disabled members. my union ran a donations campaign for me for the interim between the end of my allotted paid leave and my disability claim
"unionize your workplace" means so much more than "talk to your coworkers about striking." you gotta actively know what a union is and what a union isn't before you can form one. calls to unionize should lead to more people learning their rights and learning how unions work, and coordinating with orgs like seiu and the teamsters and the aft (and if you don't know what those are, look them up).
My union found me a legal expert to help me check over my last redundancy settlement for free, provided private medical cover whilst I was unemployed, and negotiated a good deal on cheap insurance for their members. It is so much more than strikes.
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You know, when I've remarked that a lot of the responses to my posts feel like people are just plucking out keywords they think they recognise based on the shape of them and replying to what they imagine the post says based on that, the possibility never occurred to me that this is actually how many American schools are currently teaching kids to read.
Like, my assumption this whole time has been that when folks go "I misunderstood this post that says [thing] as saying [unrelated thing] because I mistook [word] for [completely different word that happens to start with the same letter]", that was a bit. What do you mean they're teaching kids a reading method that's tailored to produce this exact error?
Please also keep in mind that region and age will effect if the American has been taught this way. There are young adults who were taught to read like this, but this system was forced more fully into place within the past 10-15 years, so many current teenagers are effected by it.
Many teachers TRIED to warn about this, but our government forced the changes. I have met multiple teachers who've openly complained and tried to talk to the boards if directors about it, but if you didn't/don't comply, you could lose your job.
The podcast version of this article is how I first learned about this, and it's also excellent (link in the link above but just in case):
There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation — even though it was proven wrong by
As someone who doesn't have kids and whose nephews are voracious readers who (when I've asked) seemed to have escaped three-cueing, this was absolutely dumbfounding to me. It really does make a LOT of sense in terms of how people read, write, and react to the written word these days. (FYI it wasn't just taught in the US but we definitely championed it in a big way, largely because, you guessed it, capitalism.)
Anyway if you've got the time and like longform audio journalism, this is also great.
