Junopsis

if it's a rock and you lick it, your tongue got a little dirty.

If it's a bone, it sticks to your tongue.

And that is simply not true. It’s bullshit. But the harm is does to people is very real. Kids are so afraid of getting older, and one of the big fears is that their life will become painfully bland and boring once they hit adulthood, as if all adults do is work and pay taxes, possibly raise kids. No more fun, no whimsy, no playfulness, no joy.

You’re better at recognizing fandom patterns and can avoid the toxic ones, leading to increased fandom enjoyment.

The easiest way is to scroll to the bottom of any page on AO3 and look at the left-hand side of the footer. Find Low Vision Default and tap on that, and you’re set.

If you don’t like the looks of Low Vision Default (or if you just want the text inside the fics to be larger but not the rest of the site), you can create your own very simple site skin:

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Paste the CSS below into the big empty box

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CSS is as follows:

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Set whatever pt font you prefer to read with and enjoy.

To bring squid facts to you. To your friends. To your neighbors. To some random dude named Brad who you've never met.

How? The Squid Facts Project. It's a street art campaign and hotline that texts folks squid facts!

Only snag in this hair-brained plan is that texting people is kiiinda expensive. So! I teamed up with Philly artist Corey Danks to sell shirts to keep the hotline running. Every one of those shirt dollars helps deliver squid facts to people.

Like, over 70,000 people over the last year!!! Isn't that wild?

So anyway. Get a shirt. They're cool, *and* they keep people learning about squid. It's a beautiful thing.

Also, the backs have the squid facts hotline on them so by wearing these you're helping people learn about squid too.

Off the back of that, they had the idea to do an index of their own based on their own experiences of the cheapest products that many people rely on having increases way above inflation or being removed altogether.

This isn’t just a feeling, Jack literally kept the receipts. They have over 10 years of shopping receipts kept for their food blog.

The twitter thread took off and has now had over 22 million views.

The idea of a separate UK index of everyday products people on lower incomes rley on, that reflects the actual affect of price changes on ordinary people’s finances, has completely taken off and is now being covered in all the major news outlets. It is also being supported by a whole range of organisations, camapaigners, retail industry professionals, data analysts and others.

Jack has put out a call for people in the UK to send their old shopping receipts to add to the exissting data for tracking historic price changes.

Today Jack tweeted that they had permission from the Pratchett estate for the use of the preferred name for the new project: 

But if you asked, “Would you let the statue of liberty burn in order to save your child? your spouse? someone you loved a great deal?” the tune abruptly changes. At the very least, there’s a hesitation. Even if they deny it, I’m willing to bet that gun to their head, the answer would be “yes.”  

The basic problem here is that people have a hard time seeing outside their own sphere of influence, and empathizing beyond the few people who are right in front of them. You’ve got your immediate family, whom you love; your friends, your acquaintances, maybe to a certain degree the people who share a status with you (your religion, your race, etc.)–but beyond that? People aren’t real. They’re theoretical. 

But a national monument? That’s real. It stands for something. The value of a non-realized anonymous life that exists completely outside your sphere of influence is clearly worth less than something that represents freedom and prosperity to a whole nation, right?

People who think like this lack the compassion to realize that everyone is in someone’s immediate sphere of influence–that everyone is someone’s lover, or brother, or parent. Everyone means the world to someone. And it’s the absolute height of selfishness to assume that their lives don’t have value just because they don’t mean the world to you. 

an example: so, as the nazis began war against france, the staff of the louvre began crating up and shipping out the artworks. it was vital to them (for many reasons) that the nazis not get their hands on the collections, and hitler’s desire for them was known, so they dispersed the objects to the four winds; one of the curators personally traveled with la gioconda, mona lisa herself, in an unmarked crate, moving at least five times from location to location to avoid detection.

they even removed and hid the nike of samothrace, “winged victory,” which is both delicate, having been pieced back together from fragments, and incredibly heavy, weighing over three metric tons.

the curators who hid these artworks risked death to ensure that they wouldn’t fall into nazi hands. and yes, they are just paintings, just statues. but when i think about the idea of hitler capturing and standing smugly beside the nike of samothrace, a statue widely beloved as a symbol of liberty, i completely understand why someone would risk their life to prevent that. if my life was all that stood between a fascist dictator and a masterpiece that inspired millions, i would be willing to risk it. my belief in the power and necessity of art would demand i do so.

if, however, a nazi held a gun to some kid’s head (any kid!) and asked me which crate the mona lisa was in, they could have it in a heartbeat. no problem! i wouldn’t even have to think about it. being willing to risk my own life on principle doesn’t mean i’m willing to see others endangered for those same principles.

and that is exactly where the conservative hard-right falls right the fuck down. they are, typically, entirely willing to watch others suffer for their own principles. they are perfectly okay with seeing children in cages because of their supposed belief in law and order. they are perfectly willing to let women die from pregnancy complications because of their anti-abortion beliefs. they are alright with poverty and disease on general principle because they hold the free-market sacrosanct. and i guess from their own example they would save the statue of liberty and let human beings burn instead.

but speaking as a leftist (i’m more comfortable with socialist tbh), my principles are not abstract things that i hold aside from life, apart or above my place as a human being in a society. my beliefs arise from being a person amidst people. i don’t love art for art’s sake alone, actually! i don’t love objects because they are objects: i love them because they are artifacts of our humanity, because they communicate and connect us, because they embody love and curiosity and fear and feeling. i love art because i love people. i want universal health care because i want to see people universally cared for. i want universal basic income because people’s safety and dignity should not be determined by their economic productivity to an employer. i am anti-war and pro-choice for the same reason: i value people’s lives but also their autonomy and right to self-determination. my beliefs are not abstractions. i could never value a type of economic system that i saw hurting people, no matter how much “growth” it produced. i could never love “law and order” more than i love a child, any child, i saw trapped in a cage.

This is also why they think “get a job” is useful advice. In their heads they honestly do not understand why the NPCs who make up the majority of the human race can’t just flip a switch from “no job” to “job.” When they say “get a job” they’re filing a glitch report with God and they honestly think that’s all it takes.

Conservatives view social issues as universal constants that fundamentally are unable to be changed, like the weather. You can try to alter your own behavior to protect yourself (you can carry an umbrella), and you can commiserate about how bad the weather is, but you can’t stop it from raining. This is why conservatives blame victims of rape for dressing immodestly or for drinking or for going out at night: to them, those things are like going out without an umbrella when you know it’s going to rain. 

“But then why do conservatives try to stop things they dislike by making them illegal, like drug use or immigration or abortion?” And the answer is: they’re not. They know perfectly well that those things will continue. No amount of studies showing that their methods are ineffective will matter to them because effectiveness is not the point. The point is to punish people for doing bad things, because punishing people is how you show your disapproval of their actions; if you don’t punish them, then you’re condoning their behavior. 

This is why they will never support rehabilitative prisons, even though they reduce crime. This is why they will never support free birth control for everyone, even though that would reduce abortions. This is why they will never support just giving homeless people houses, even though it’s proven to be cheaper and more effective at stopping homelessness than halfway houses and shelters. It’s not about stopping evil, because you can’t; it’s about saying definitively what is Bad and what is Good, and we as a society do that by punishing the people we’ve decided are bad.