O_o;

anyway i wanted a memento of my first pride, you know, and this one vendor was selling keyrings, and i liked it, so i bought one. do you remember those italian charm bracelets that were all the rage like 10-15 years ago? it was a keychain like that, and it had a rainbow rooster, a rainbow cat, and then just a rainbow, and so I bought it.

i run into my mom a couple of vendors over and she goes oh you bought something? what’d you get? so i showed her, and i was like, “I’m not sure why it’s a rooster and a cat. Seems kind of random. But I liked the rainbows.”

and my mom, who was some form of minister’s wife for most of my childhood and teenagerhood, stares at me like she thinks i’m joking.

“What?” i say.

…relic…

one: you notice how it's on the bleeding edge between burnt and well done? that's because that's basically the only way to get a pizza with this much pepperoni to be remotely edible. this pizza cook worked very hard to make this work, pepperoni is really difficult to use a lot of on a pizza because it interferes with the cooking. it's fatty, and fat is insulating, which means it makes it harder to cook the dough. it's not just about being stingy (though I'm sure that corporate pizza has reduced the number of slices on pepperoni pizzas to save money for sure), there really is an ideal ratio of pepperoni to crust to sauce to cheese, and you don't have to exceed it by a lot to fuck a pizza up. (this is true of most ingredients, tbh, pizza is at all times mere inches from becoming a casserole, and adding extra ingredients in excessive amounts is a good way to get to casserole, particularly if they are wet ingredients, like onions or green peppers)

two: this picture was taken for the internet, so the person probably cleaned up the pizza before they took the picture. if they cut it in a box, they moved it to a fresh box. they cleaned up extra grease, soaked it up with paper towels or napkins. your pizza is almost certainly not going to look nearly this good.

three: people who work in pizza also have access to the internet. I cannot tell you how many none pizza with left beef orders I have canceled on sight. there's a reasonable chance someone will look at this copy and go 'oh it's the meme pizza' and cancel your order immediately and without hesitation.

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."

Link to the pdf of the tool kit

you don't deserve me at my