Butt Stallion Says Hello

One of the tweets I saw was a surgeon who’d taken a picture of her OR, having just finished surgery on a young man who’d been shot. Blood. Everywhere.

This bloke retweeted her, mentioning that he worked as a cleaner in a hospital and had had to clean up stuff like this and worse.

Surgeon replied to him (and went up *greatly* in my estimation) and, despite living in different countries, thanked him for his hard work.

I can’t find the tweets sadly, but hers went something like;

Every garbage workers’ strike shows it.

Leonard Pollard

My mom was having trouble using they/them prnouns with some friends for a while. One day she said “I think the problem is that I haven’t changed the way I view their gender outside of their pronouncs which adds several extra steps in converting binary pronouns to they/them then conjugating it. So I need to shift how I see them as a gendered person entirely to make using their pronouns easier.” And since then she hardly ever messes up.

Megamind from Megamind has blue BALD and pronouns!

It's pridemo

Happy praimoth

fuck discord.

Turn these off NOW. If you wait they can use whatever you've said or shared with your friends on there until whenever you turn it off, even after you turn it off.

You are going to fucking vote for Joe Biden, and you are going to give us a fucking chance to save our country from fascism, and you aren't going to fucking complain about it, because there is literally no other choice.

We will not let another election be a close call. Are you listening?

It doesn't matter. It does. not. matter.

Not every battle is about progress. Sometimes it's just holding the line until we get reinforcements. And they are coming. The Gen Z vote was monumental in stopping the red wave, and there are increasing numbers as more and more come of age.

1) Raised taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

2) Highest appointment of federal judges since Reagan. Reagan started a trend of Republicans packing federal courts with uber-conservative judges, and blocking Democrat appointments, which is how we ended up with our current Supreme Court. Biden is doing his absolute best to turn the scales back the other direction by appointing as many liberal and left-wing judges as he can, as fast as he can.

3) $1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure package that will pour federal money into things like public transit, high-speed internet in places that don’t have it (which are overwhelmingly poor, and cut off from the rest of the world), and a whole lot of other basic things that make life easier for ordinary people.

4) Halted Federal executions. This doesn’t affect state-level convictions, but it does affect federal-level executions; those are completely off the table for as long as he (or any other) Democrat is President. (13 people were executed under Trump)

5) Rejoining the Paris Climate Accords and pushing for other environmental care legislation,

6) Pushed through the “Inflation Reduction Act” (named that to get Republicans to be willing to allow it through). It’s actually the largest climate bill in U.S. history and allows Medicare to negotiate the prices of certain prescription drugs for the first time. It includes 369 billion for a climate initiative to reduce greenhouse emissions and promote lean energy technologies. $300 billion in new revenue through a corporate tax increase. $80 billion for the Internal Revenue Service to hire new agents, modernize its technology, audit the wealthy and more. A $2,000 annual cap for out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for those insured by Medicare.

6) Overturned Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military.

7) Re-authorized the Violence Against Women Act

8) Pardoned marijuana

9) Forgave student loan debt (this one the Republicans in congress managed to partially stymie, but that’s not Biden’s fault--it’s the Republicans).

10) Managed to get a modest gun-safety bill through the gauntlet of Republican opposition. (The first one anyone’s managed to get passed in decades.) It’s far from perfect, or enough, but it did expand background checks on gun purchases and made it easier to prosecute illegal gun trafficking. And the reason it was as weak as it was, is because the Republicans have a majority in the House and they blocked anything stronger, it’s the Republicans’ fault. Not Biden’s. If we want sensible nationwide gun control, we have GOT to get the House a Democrat majority.

11) Passed a long-stalled Post Office reform bill.

There’s a lot there! And the things that he promised but didn’t manage to achieve, he put them before Congress and the Republicans in the House stopped them. If Democrats controlled the House as well as the Senate, most of them would have passed and now be the law of the land! The problem is not Biden.

-broadband internet help ($30/month toward my comcast bill, and even if I go delinquent, they are required to keep my internet connected albeit with a slower connection.  the point is: my internet cannot be cut off) -multiple SNAP increases -direct stimulus -MAJOR improvements to Medicare.  I have a $0 copay for EVERYTHING now through my Medicare Advantage plan.  Including prescription medicine!! I pay nothing!  Ambulance, hospital stay? Again, I pay nothing.  Including vision and dental and hearing aids if I needed them. -my Medicare OTC card used to just give me a little to buy medicine.  Now I get $205/month and I can use it for OTC medicines, groceries, and utility bills!  This is literally more money in my pocket every month. -speaking of that, Biden has given us two historically large COLA raises for Social Security.  Last year’s was the biggest raise in 4 decades.  This year promises to be very good, too.

this doesn’t even count in the multiple kinds of student debt relief or the pandemic-era child tax credit, because they didn’t affect me personally, but I know both of those moves were life-changing for people i know.  Not to mention a long overdue infrastructure bill.  And the fact that he has accomplished all this with the weakest possible senate “majority” really speaks volumes.  

Me: No it’s 5 am, I’m not going ANYWHERE to dance

My brain: NIINKU CHA CHA CHA

Me: Please let me sleep

Highways are usually two-to-four (at the widest) lane roads that meander the US landscape. Think Route 66, dinosaur statues, mom-and-pop diners, southern gothic. There are state-level and national-level highways. Some run for a 100 miles, some, like US HWY-17, run most of the East Coast:

That red line is US HWY 17. If you follow it, you will go through tiny towns. You may hit stoplights. I kid you not, you will see spinning cows on poles. Businesses exist along highways that you are encouraged to pull over and visit. They were designed to let you see America.

Yeah.

Now, interstates were made in the 50s and were made to get people from Point A to Point B. These suckers range from four lanes to eight lanes around big cities. They cut through everything. If you want to get to a business, you have to take an exit ramp and detour. They are great for getting places fast. You can still have weird experiences on them, but usually at night, when your eyes start playing tricks on you. Or there are deer.

I-95 is a massive corridor that runs from the Florida Keys to the Canadian Border. You can see the difference just looking at the maps.

As far as writing goes:

If you want quirky character development inside the car, you’re looking for an interstate. The majority of Americans take interstates to go on road trips.

If you want mysterious and/or supernatural hijinks, you’re looking for a highway. They are weird, weird places, and they’re surprisingly easy to wind up on if you leave the interstate.

In the midwest, and I expect the southwest, to the interstate can get some real wonky vibes because YOU ARE ALONE. You are on one black strip of neverending road across hours and hours and hours of alone. You can drive very fast for a very long time and not see signs of another human being. Sometimes the alone-ness is added to by the sheer flatness of the land around you. You can see for forever and there’s nobody here. You sometimes see dead gas stations or billboards with only scraps of paper left on them.

You are in tornado ally and there is NOWHERE to hide if a blizzard or thunderstorm or twister comes for you. If it’s winter the snow is BLINDING.

At night there’s fuck all. Sometimes you have trucks sometimes its so quiet and dark and the moon is full and you can still see for miles and miles and miles all alone.

The Diné people say to never pick up hitchhikers cause they’re skinwalkers and it sure as hell feels like it when you see a random stranger on the side of the road after miles of fuckin nothing.

You go forever until you get to a tiny rest stop covered in roaches and tarantulas (some of them the sizes of dinner plates). The rest stop is a set of bathrooms and a vending machine. It’s for truckers to spend the night. It’s for emergency bathroom breaks. There’s nothing else. It’s hot as fuck even at night when everything is lit orange by the street lamps in the parking lot. You can still see the tarantulas.