Dispatches from the Middle Circle

So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.

So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.

Link to the article

air travel is a mess? shortage of air traffic controllers - for some mysterious reason

logistics a mess? shortage of truck drivers - for some mysterious reason

public transit can't meet demand? shortage of bus drivers - for some mysterious reason

We even mysteriously have shortages of doctors, nurses, teachers... FOR SOME MYSTERIOUS REASON

I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.

Sure. That’s how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:

Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.

No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.

So here’s what we’re gonna do gang:

Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:

Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.

Express that you didn’t actually want it, you just couldn’t see on the shelf how much it was.

POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.

When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you don’t want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)

If it’s a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If it’s a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.

In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.

For the past few days, a heatwave has glowered over the Pacific Northwest, forcing temperatures in the region to a record-breaking 118ºF. Few people in the region—neither Americans nor Canadians—have air-conditioning. Stores sold out of new AC units in hours as a panicked public sought a reasonable solution to the emergency. Unfortunately, air-conditioning is part of what’s causing the unusual heatwave in the first place.

We came close to destroying all life on Earth during the Cold War, with the threat of nuclear annihilation. But we may have come even closer during the cooling war, when the rising number of Americans with air conditioners—and a refrigerant industry that fought regulation—nearly obliterated the ozone layer. We avoided that environmental catastrophe, but the fundamental problem of air conditioning has never really been resolved.

Mechanical cooling appeared in the early 1900s not for comfort but for business. In manufacturing, the regulation of temperature—“process cooling”—controlled the quality of commodities like cotton, tobacco, and chewing gum. In 1903, Alfred Wolff installed the first cooling system for people at the New York Stock Exchange because comfortable traders yielded considerably higher stock returns. Only in the ’20s did “commercial cooling” appear. On Memorial Day weekend 1925, Willis Carrier debuted the first centrifugal air-conditioning system at the Rivoli Theater in Midtown Manhattan. Previously, theaters had shut down in the summer. With air-conditioning, the Rivoli became “the talk of Broadway” and inaugurated the summer blockbuster.

-another direct tie to capitalism. Everything born out of colonio-capitalism carries its toxic mark. Article totally not under the cut for those who can’t pay for Time. It honestly paints a really clear picture of the situation. Bolding mine.-

“It’s time we become more comfortable with discomfort. Our survival may depend on it.“

This isn’t about “discomfort” and “our need to adapt” - something our useless governments are already saying (and they’re all too eager to get such approval from the media as they’re already doing nothing so they can continue doing nothing).

It’s about DEATH from heat exhaustion/heat stroke, severe dehydration, and the breakdown of our bodies’ normal capacity to regulate one’s temperature.

What’s the hottest temperature the human body can cope with?

How high can internal temperature of the human body temperature go?

Record Heat: How the Body Reacts to Soaring Temperatures

What Are the Limits of Human Survival?

It’s not about “enduring” it. You can’t “toughen up” to this. Body temperature regulation is as important as getting food and sleep. Otherwise, you will die.

Heat waves are already deadly for infants, children, the elderly, and disabled people. Most medication is extremely dehydrating and make us even more vulnerable to heat exhaustion.

anyone advocating for removal of all ac units just want people like me (such as, say, my family, because these conditions are genetic) to die and it’s exhausting

@nilpointfive exactly!!!! like…. I’m sorry but going for solutions that boil down to “make disabled people die en masse” is just ridiculous ESPECIALLY when we have the tech and engineering innovation necessary to make eco-friendly (or just eco neutral) versions of different techs instead

instead op just turned it into “anyone who needs AC should die I guess”

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

Equiping an armor tutorial

A little bit for Monica, she's my wife

A little bit for Erica, for her strife

My books all go to Rita, cause she reads

My greenhouse goes to Tina, she plants trees

The furniture is Sandra's, on my lawn

Jewelry for Mary, she can pawn

Ashes go to Jessica, that's my plan

And another thing.

But after the HG lawsuit hit, FASA began purging BT of references, or at least ceasing/minimizing mentions of them. And that shift began to create and/or was symptomatic of an internal culture shift towards taking things more seriously. So we lost a ton of the more overt references to things that were wacky and fun — they still do happen but with less frequency and certainly with much less spotlighting. This also went hand-in-hand with a drive to get less deeply detailed with things. The level of depth and detail of the original House books from the early 90s has not been equalled since, despite the fact that those sourcebooks cover an era over a century and a quarter into the past of the setting, as of now.

All this culminated, imo, in MW5 Clans, where on multiple occasions we should have seen the Clanners in full ceremonial regalia, but instead got them in dress uniforms at best... for the foreground characters. The generic background characters got barely anything to distinguish them from one another — take for example, the conclave scene in the opening of Wolves of Tukayyid; we ought to have seen the Vipers and the Falcons and the Nova Cats and the Diamond Sharks in their uniforms, but instead anyone that isn't the Wolves, Bears, amd Jaguars get essentially identical models with very little detail, and while we DO see Khan Lincoln Osis, he gets zero lines and is mostly also in the background. They could have done full justice to the scene, but they didn't.