A Random Collection

Word already had a word count?! That WORKED?

Okay, cryptkeepers, let's do a super well-planned demographic survey.

don’t watch it for me, I’m barely in it and was mostly behind the scenes as a PA (though you can spot me on screen twice if you’re looking lmao, and my friend says I look VERY sexy in my suit). watch it for all the fantastic disabled actors who bring the story to life, and the incredibly charming concept that carried this project to a win! It’s a 5 minute short and definitely worth your time, I’m so proud of my talented and amazing friends!

Logline: A diversity club for disabled people finally finds the one place in town that actually got everything right — and it's a strip club.

Like, I very much appreciate people trying to be mindful of their consumption and trying to be sustainable. But I need y'all to understand that it literally does not matter. The top 10% are doing more damage than all of us together could ever prevent.

you know, until we remember what to do with rich bastards.

How Democratic consultants, committees, and party leaders built a fundraising spam pipeline that funnels money from a captive pool of elderly donors into their own operations.

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As The New York Times reported in 2021, the all-caps writing and manufactured panic of political fundraising spam function as a filter, repelling savvy donors and taking advantage of the same cognitive vulnerabilities that make seniors targets for online fraud. A 2024 CNN investigation quoted a complaint from one person who discovered that their 93-year-old father was being inundated with Democratic donation appeals. “These fraudsters need to stop defrauding older people,” it read, “especially ones with mental impairments.”

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Republicans went all-in on these tactics first and offer a cautionary tale. After flooding supporters’ phones with fundraising spam in recent election cycles, their grassroots donor base — the party supporters who occasionally give when something moves them, until the spam drives them off — has been hollowed out. Republicans raised less from small- and mid-sized donors in 2024, a presidential year, than in the 2022 midterms.

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Whether or not those who operate this fundraising model recognize or intend it, fundraising spam runs on similar psychological levers to those that federal law enforcement and consumer-protection groups identify as hallmarks of elder financial exploitation: manufactured urgency, emotional appeals engineered to trigger guilt or fear, false exclusivity, fabricated account or profile statuses that look like official notices, and relentless pressure to give before there’s time to think. Why stamp “FINAL ATTEMPT” on a message and warn that “the deadline is just hours away” if not to manufacture urgency? Why claim that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Hakeem Jeffries have emailed you, then demand an answer to their “desperate pleas” if not to trigger guilt? Why warn that Social Security checks will be “SLASHED by $500/month?!” — up from the $460 in the email sent two days earlier — if not to stoke fear? Why tell someone they are “the only Democrat in your city who hasn’t responded” if not to single them out? Why announce a recipient’s “appointment to the Social Security Advisory Board” above a picture of a Social Security card if not to dress a solicitation as official business? Why the midnight deadlines, the countdown timers, the “400% MATCH” that applies only if you give right now, if not to force a decision before reflection can intervene?

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Defenders justify the model with one claim: It works. Federal records show this is a half-truth, and a troubling one at that. In the fall of 2025, when Paul Rivera — tasked with writing the DNC’s 2024 post-election autopsy report — asked me to estimate how much Democrats now spend to raise a single dollar, my analysis of the data revealed a profound collapse in fundraising efficiency. The share of campaign dollars consumed by fundraising costs had ballooned from 8 cents per dollar in 2008 to more than 50 cents by 2024. Spam operations make up a growing share of that spending, and are especially inefficient. In 2025, they consumed between 70 and 75 cents of every dollar they raised.

The Oakland Zoo's bison program is in collaboration with the Blackfeet Nation in Montana. This baby was released with others from the Oakland Zoo herd as part of returning bison to the plains of Montana.

We can't erase what colonists and settlers did, but we can work to fix the damage, and many, many people and organizations are working to save the bison and re-wild them, led by the indigenous peoples of the US and Canada who have been their stewards for so long.

I encourage everyone to find out what programs and systems they can support in their local areas and communities-- it can be as fun as purchasing a zoo or museum membership if those orgs do this kind of work.