The Glue of the World

Elon Musk on restoring You Know Who’s account on Twitter, after a one-day online poll :

“Vox populi. Vox Dei.”

English translation:  “The voice of the people is the voice of God.”

Full original Latin quote referenced : “Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, vox populi, vox dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.” 

English translation: "Do not listen to those who say the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the tumult of the crowd is always close to madness.”

A Super Who’s Who.

College costs:

Bernie:  Free.  Hillary:  Significantly cheaper than currently, free for those who need it.  Trump:  Defrauded poor and working class people for 10s of thousands of dollars of tuition.

Minimum wage:

Bernie: 15   Hillary:  12-15  Trump:  Imported undocumented workers and underpaid them to work on his projects.  Currently makes his clothing line in China for tiny wages.

Foreign wars:  Bernie:  Probably not.  Hillary:  As prudent.  Trump:  NUCLEAR FUCKING PROLIFERATION!!! NOW!!!

Immigration:  Hillary and Bernie:  Path to citizenship.  Trump:  THROW THEM OUT! BUILD A WALL!

Taxes:  Bernie:  Deep tax increases on the wealthy (and middle class).  Hillary:  Some tax increases on the wealthy.  Trump:  Cut’em.  Cut’em all!

Racism:  Bernie:  Solving income inequality will solve racism.  Hillary:  we need a good plan to increase opportunities to minorities beyond solving income inequality.  Trump:  Yeah, dun care.

Sexism:  Bernie:  Solving income inequality will solve sexism.  Hillary:  Full support of all equal rights issues.  Trump:  Ladies, all your vag are belong to me (no fatties).

Gun control:  Bernie:  Mayyyyyybbbie, if you convince me hard enough.  Hillary:  Yep.  Trump:  Shoot’em if you gott’em.

Absolutely!

Styling is the key to almost any professional work with text. Creating copy for websites? Style it! Writing a roleplaying adventure? Style it! Writing an article? Style it! Pretty much anything that will be published digitally or physically benefits from being styled, and it tells whoever you’re working with that you have at least a modicum of organizational skills and consideration for others’ time (which, in the publishing world, means you’re a lot more likely to get more work). If you’re producing your own work for self-publication, styling helps keep everything organized and looking professional for your reads.

You can find a lot of tutorial, ranging from basic to advanced (those are just for Word, but almost any professional word-processing software uses styles, and InDesign uses some amazingly granular and powerful style controls). They can seem a little alien at first, but all you really have to remember is that you need one “style” for each kind of text you want to produce. You running body text that’s 12 Times New Roman? Make that a style. If you’ve got a headline that’s larger and bold, make that a separate style. If you’re making an RPG product and including statblocks or something similar that uses a different format than your running text, make that a style.

Here’s a quick list of what I use in my day job (in a professional publishing environment; you probably won’t need nearly this many):

This means that each of your paragraphs or headlines or notes is tagged with a specific label that the computer recognizes, and if you decide halfway through writing your you hate Time New Roman, all you have to do is edit your Body Copy style, and change it to use Helvetica, and your document will automatically change ALL the paragraphs using the Body Copy style to be Helvetica. You can change the color, spacing, font, size, and plenty of other details from one control panel, and not have to pick through your entire document to select each headline, for example, and change its color manually.

This all becomes incredibly useful when it’s time to publish, when you generally want to use different fonts and sizes than what you use to write your turnover. Having a headline style means you or your designer can change your dull bold headlines into something stylish and appropriate with just a little fiddling in a menu, rather than editing each line manually. Styles are a great example of a little bit of prep work that saves you a lot of time later one, and really smooths out your workflow.

Today is more or less the day that the Democratic nominee is decided.

 It is in, in fact, very decisively going to be Hillary Rodham Clinton. 

I can already feel the outrage that is about to pour out on this site: the conspiracy theories, the bungled attempts at “math” (which, btw, are almost always inaccurate or wrong), the ugly, sexist memes of HRC that we can all laugh at because hey, if it’s HRC, who gives a fuck?

But before you angrily typesmash into your keyboard about how the establishment is rigged and how the DNC better abide by the “will of the people” and hand the nom to Sanders on a silver platter, I’d like to ask you to take a deep breath and step back for a moment.

First, you need to accept that the fact that Sanders has come so far is a big fucking DEAL. Last year, he was an unknown. This year, he proved to be an excellent challenge to the Democratic establishment, and he’s already inspired dozens of copycats around the country to challenge establishment corruption. It’s a GREAT thing.

But let’s not pretend that he was/is a perfect candidate. I’d actually argue that him and HRC are probably no more and no less “corrupt” or “twisted” than the other. This was especially true in the last few weeks of the campaign, where he got especially ugly and weird, whether it was racking up no less than 639 pages of FEC violations (the irony) to not denouncing the violence and personal death threats sent to super delegates (how hard is it to JUST say “that’s not OK!”? i mean really)  to falsely accusing HRC of FEC violations (spoiler: she has none). Honestly, if Tumblr had bothered to vet Sanders even a quarter as much as they did HRC, he would not be this site’s favorite grandpa.

But that’s all counterproductive now. So as tempting as it is, I’m gonna let it go.

Now I’m gonna say something controversial:

HILLARY CLINTON? SHE’S NOT A TERRIBLE PERSON.

There. I said it. What a shocker.

People go on and on about how Sanders got the millennial vote (and handily, at that), but what they always leave out is that HRC got literally EVERY OTHER demographic. Why?

No really, why?

Simple: she LISTENS to them. And then she translates what she’s heard into policy.

Her job isn’t to preach at the bully pulpit. She listens. There’s a reason why she doesn’t hold rallies of thousands, but has garnered the vote of top people at practically every demographic or movement , whether it was the mothers of the movement (incl travyon martin and sandra bland’s mother), the fuckING human rights campaign, planned parenthood, literally every minority vote EVER, and others. 

And she turned those inputs into real policy. No for real. Go read her policy statements. They are the most well-researched, detailed, boring things ever. They are GREAT. Her inner policy nerd probs came out because her plans are the most well researched of any candidate possibly ever, and will also put you right to sleep because of how disgustingly long and well written they are.

Now ppl are gonna say “oh she panders” or whatever but yA KNOW WHAT?!? 

She also fucking follows through. For real.

Let’s take a famous example: HRC was against gay marriage until like 2013!1!1

(so was Obama, but i mean whatever right? he’s a guy so we cut him slack)

Great. What a bitch.

Except… not.

Because once she came out in favor of gay marriage, SHE WENT ALL THE FUCKING WAY. She worked to EXPAND LGBT rights at the state department , and gave a historic speech at the Geneva Convention that “Gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights” , a move so fucking controversial and terrifying that it literally made anti-LGBT countries nervous.

 HER FUCKING CAMPAIGN MANAGER, ROBBY MOOK, IS AN OPENLY GAY MAN. (and quite a hottie <3)

 Also, she is the ONLY presidential candidate to have walked in a lgbt pride parade, EVER. (this pic is circa like 2002)

How’s that #throwbackthursday for ya?

My point is: she’s not right on the issues 100% of the time (wow she’s human?!? no wAY) BUT she will fight for the issues and get shit done.

So my plea is this: 

 Look for the good in HRC. 

She’s a thoughtful person and a listener – those who know her have said that the former is in fact her best trait. Think she’s too center or right on your fave issues? FUCKING TALK ABOUT IT. Let her campaign know. 

I’m not asking anyone to tattoo HRC on their chest or start phonebanking for her tomorrow or anything like that. (In fact, don’t, that’s weird as shit)

Vote for Bernie in whatever primaries are left and do not feel the need to suddenly become a living breathing campaigner .

This has been a tough, tough election and I get that it will be very hard to get over the negative image you have of HRC, but I trust that people are smart enough to get it done. So do it, I beg of you. 

And finally, like every pretentious ass post on this website ends…

REBLOG. SPREAD THIS SHIT LIKE WILDFIRE.

Hillary wasn’t content with the First Lady role as it was then. She wanted to expand it and they fucking despised her for it. A woman who didn’t know her place? The NERVE of it. (No really. Old white dudes in power. They did not bother to hide why they hated her)

I’ve spent more than a little time these past few months researching the memes bernie fans I follow reblog without question and literally every single time I debunked them within a few keystrokes on Google. They were either absolutely false or 80% lies with 5% Truth and 15% exaggeration.

AND they all originated with Republican/Right Wing sources.

Get that.

People literally volunteered to become mouthpieces for something they would be horrified by if they saw. They passed along this shit like it was the gospel truth and patted themselves on the back for how progressive and forward thinking they were while they did it.

These are just a few of the ungenerous reviews the new Baldur’s Gate expansion, Siege of Dragonspear, is getting on Steam. The game has generated this response entirely because Beamdog Entertainment included a trans character in their updated material.

All they did was INCLUDED a trans character. Baldur’s Gate occupies a place at the crossroads of video gaming, tabletop gaming, and gaming nostalgia. Obviously it’s attracted the worst elements from all of these communities. It’s also meant that a friend has faced days of harassment.

I’m not asking that you buy this game—though, that couldn’t hurt. Rather, please, lend Beamdog your support, your kind words, your appreciation for helping to make gaming more inclusive, and a reminder that adding LGBTQ content to a game wins more than public hate, harassment, and toxic reviews.

(Additionally, you should absolutely check out Kathrine Cross’s words on Virtue Signalling & Trans Characters in Baldur’s Gate.)

This company’s takeaway from this experience, in 2016, cannot be that including LGBTQ content in a video game is not worth the pain. 

Your support and positivity would mean a great deal right now.  

Steam page for Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear.

Beamdog’s forum for Siege of Dragonspear.