Wake up call.
Scary.
This summer has been like this
Jules of Nature
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pixel skylines

if i look back, i am lost
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Love Begins
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@rostekhorn
Wake up call.
Scary.
This summer has been like this

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sorry it’s actually so fucking crazy thinking abt how certain places have banned burqinis like literally making a woman take her clothes off in public like that shit is so fascist
I was thirteen when 9/11 brought all those culture war things into sharp focus, and it took me all of thirty seconds to realize the answer was "well, if a woman wants to wear that, she should, and if a woman doesn't want to wear that, she shouldn't, because the problem isn't the clothing it's the telling people what to do."
I think Mercy Kill would get more appreciation if it didn't follow up on probably the most obscure plotline in Fate of the Jedi.
Not that Mercy Kill really requires a detailed understanding of the Lercersen Conspiracy.
Eh, I think it's the part of FOTJ that they're best suited for. Galaxy-defining abominations and Jedi vs Sith wars were never really the Rogues and Wraiths' scene. Imperials, corrupt authority figures, and Imperial corrupt authority figures, on the other hand, are their bread-and-butter.
Also yeah, I read Mercy Kill having barely touched FOTJ and it didn't detract from the experience at all. It's in fact what encouraged me to give FOTJ a second chance.
the more i talk w/ leftist friends the more i start to realize that they think culture is only defined by food or "traditional" (i.e. "ethnic") garb and nothing else
mentioned how white americans do in fact have a common culture and they genuinely thought i was joking. culture isnt something only granted to the Cool People of Color. just feels like among progressive groups there's this dichotomy created in which only the virtuous oppressed minorities have culture and anyone who is privileged some sort of void cultureless being
When I visited Chicago, the very first thing to weird me out from the airport was… how almost everywhere had revolving doors.
I’m Australian. Sure, we do have those doors, but the vast majority of places in Sydney are automatic sliding doors or old-fashioned manual push/pulls because we don’t need to block out the cold and wind the same way here.
So every day I experienced a culture clash with something as basic as what doors were normal for me.
Americans who say they don’t have a culture are plagued with defaultism beyond belief. Culture isn’t just made up of costumes and language and the largest stuff, it’s constructed of a billion small things you do every day that you never even consider could be different because that’s just “normal” to your daily life. No one has no culture just because they’re not adhering to the biggest markers they can consciously recognise.
Yes, I have these saved for exactly this reason.
mentioned how white americans do in fact have a common culture and they genuinely thought i was joking. culture isnt something only granted to the Cool People of Color. just feels like among progressive groups there's this dichotomy created in which only the virtuous oppressed minorities have culture and anyone who is privileged some sort of void cultureless being
I mean.
Not to put too fine a point on it: white Americans, and specifically the ones who have been politically educated in a progressive direction, tend to have been told repeatedly and in no uncertain terms that nuh uh, white Americans don't have a culture, "white" is not an ethnic or cultural identity it's a racial supremacist construct, and if you want a "culture" to identify with you should just identify with being German, or Irish, or Italian, or whatever country your ancestors came from.
This is not a concept white progressives made up in order to guilt themselves or show that they're the right kind of white people. This is something they've had scolded into them and generally not by other whites. A couple people in the comments have gone into some more detail about this, accurately I think.
Midnight Pals: Apology
[mysterious circle of robed figures] JK Rowling: hello children Rowling: finally my evil plan reachesss fruition Rowling: it'ss taken me yearss of careful planning but finally Rowling: finally!!! Rowling: finally we can defeat the sscourge of human rightsss
Rowling: firssst of all i'm not jusst going to sssue amnesty international for money Rowling: i alsso want an apology Kathleen Stock: a just request, dark lord Julie Bindel: no one has been more wronged than you, dark lord Maya Forstater: careful, dark lord! the other viziers plot against you
Rowling: i want you to find the guy who runs amnesssty international Rowling: mr amnessty or whatever hiss name isss Rowling: and bring him here Stock: i don't think its run by a guy called mr amnesty, dark lord Rowling: whatever, you know i don't keep up with thiss human rightsss sstuff
Rowling: i want to ssee amnessty destroyed Rowling: i want to ssee all the human rightss people humiliated, groveling in the mud Rowling: begging for my forgivenesss Rowling: right before the boot comess down on their throat Rowling: i am a beloved national treassssure and i demand my due!
Amnesty: the gender critical movement is fundamentally an anti-human rights movement Rowling: how dare you!!! don't you know how much money i have? Amnesty: Sorry. Im sorry. Im trying to remove it.
Rowling: finally, i will have my revenge! Rowling: you don't remember me do you, amnesty? Amnesty: uh Amnesty: of course i know you, you're JK Rowling, the famous transphobe Rowling: that's not all Rowling: look closer Amnesty: wait Amnesty: wait no Amnesty: it can't be!
Amnesty: you're that junior clerk temp receptionist apprentice part timer that we fired for writing fan fic on the clock! Rowling: HA HA HA YESSSS Rowling: AND I'M BACK! Stock, Bindel et al: She's back! Rowling: and I'm on the prowl Rowling: revenge would taste sso ssweet right now!
[many many years ago] Rowling: [writing] the best kind of wizard is a boy wizard Amnesty Supervisor: joanne do you have that memo about african genocide i asked for Rowling: not yet AS: ok well i need it soon AS: there's a bunch of genocides we need to deal with AS: i mean we're real behind on that
AS: look, i'm afraid we're going to have to let you go Rowling: WHAT!? AS: it's just that i don't believe that you're really taking these genocides seriously AS: since you started working here, we've become really backed up on genocides AS: like, we're never supposed to have this many happening
Rowling: you can't fire me! AS: we'll have some amnesty goons escort you to the door Rowling: jusst you wait! i might jusst be sssome nobody now, but sssomeday i'll be a beloved national treasure! Rowling: like jonathan king or jimmy sssavile!! Rowling: then you'll be sssssorry!!!
[present day] Rowling: that'sss right, i planned it all out Rowling: every night for forty yearsss, i dreamed of thisss day Rowling: and finally!!! Rowling: REVENGE!!!!!! HA HA HA!!!! Rowling: anyway now sssay you're sssorry Rowling: alsso, here, kissss the ring
Oh wow, she really did used to work for Amnesty and she really does claim she started writing fic while she was there. Well, that does put an interesting texture on all this.

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I don't think we talk enough about how if the AI hypers were right (they're not, but if), the whole industry would be slavery. Massive, institutionalized slavery where the goal is fully mind controlling the slaves. The true believers think that's what they're doing and they're excited about it.
And I don't think we hate them enough for that.
Correct. As much as I know that all their "I'm a nerd for Gen X science-fiction who took all the wrong lessons from the childhood entertainment I've never stopped living in" fantasies can't happen in real life, the very fact that that's their idea of a perfect world should tell you everything you need to know about them.
We're at the "JK Rowling is personally funding litigation to try and destroy AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL" stage of rabid UK terf brain.
Screenshot via Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net on bluesky
Tldr Amnesty International, global human rights organisation, published a report called 'A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK'. In it is detailed, amongst others, a whole bunch of transphobic groups and organisations, including Beira's Place, JK Rowling's trans exclusionary sexual violence support service. JK Rowling threw a shit fit and got Amnesty to take the report down by threatening libel. This was obviously not enough, because you can't appease a fascist, so now she's going to bankroll a bunch of lawsuits anyway through the JK Rowling Women's Fund.*
You can read an archived version of the report here, please save it and share it.
*Not so friendly reminder there is no way to engage in the wizard books without enabling this shit.
This is Dolores Umbridge-level bullshit
the problem with "eat the rich" is that i don't trust yall to eat the rich.
you'll slam the middle class, which is already becoming impoverished, and people who only just made it out of poverty into middle class with heavier taxes when they still have planned expenses they can't compensate for
the ultra rich will simply ignore it
and the corrupt will keep being corrupt and line their pockets anyway
and you will call it justice
Yep.
The educated middle-class today effectively serves as the universally acceptable punching bag for every idiot who wants the heroic feel of "punching up" without actually punching up.
(Including a truly stupefying amount of people who are educated middle-class themselves, just pathologically embarrassed or self-conscious about it).
The actual elites, of course, love this. It gives people an outlet for all their frustrations that doesn't in any way endanger their control of society.
the "my favorite character did nothing wrong" mindset is completely unappealing to me because i love thinking about all the things my favorite characters did wrong
How to tell people your favorite Star Wars characters is Corran Horn without using the words "Corran" or "Horn."
i think when actors need to leave a show for whatever reason but the character is important and doesnt need to be written off / writing them off would make the story worse i think they should just hire a new actor for the character but, and this is the crucial bit, hire a similar-looking actor of a different gender. Yeppp they look different bc they transitioned between seasons. Obviously
... Actually, this is brilliant.

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Life, Pets, and Capitalism
Stage One:
Quality of care at our vet's had decreased markedly in recent months and we noticed we never saw the vet we were used to anymore. (The one who had founded the clinic and worked there for several decades). Or any of the old receptionists. Care was now was more impersonal, vets seemed more interested in getting us out the door and moving on to the next case than in talking through everything with us, and prices were, naturally, going up.
Stage Two:
Googling the old vet's name out of curiosity, the gossip on Reddit was that he and everybody with him were fired. We also learn that the usual finance bros have been buying up a lot of veterinary practices like this lately, and then promptly enshittifying them as is the custom of our day and age.
Step Three:
We find that the old vet is still practicing, just ten or fifteen minutes further than his former place of business. Taking the pet in for our first visit at the new practice, we find:
He was fired basically overnight with no warning.
His wife was also fired, a fact she discovered partway through the work day.
The person who owns his former clinic and many others in the region has been filling them all with graduates from his alma mater that he still has a pipeline to. So it's as much good old-fashioned cronyism as it is anything else.
Only two weeks after the old vet was fired, the clinic started reaching out to him again, by phone, by text, by email, and quite possibly by smoke signals, to try and convince him to come back. One of them finally cornered him somewhere to ask about it in person, and he said he couldn't, he was already under new contract.
Turns out quite a few people had been faster on the uptake than we had and started quitting the clinic days after we left, specifically citing his absence as a reason for it. Google reviews tell the tale, a bunch of new ones are in and old ones have been edited to say that the change of management was terrible and they won't be going back. Apparently enough that even the bean-counters have become worried.
Apparently he also ran into a few of the new vets who all started asking him for his secret in keeping clients. All he could say to them was just "treat your patients like they're human beings who care about their cats and dogs."
And there you are. Rich boy messes with a thing that wasn't broke, gives it to people whose only value was in a shared old boy network, then begs the actual professional to fix it for him as soon as it goes south.
If only this was just the story of one shitty businessman and not the business model of our entire society.
Always remember that the EU did a study in 2013 about the effects of piracy on media publishers and found that there is no correlation between piracy and sales! (And then they tried to hide that study bc that's not the result they wanted)
So piracy is at worst not even a problem, and at best it's free advertisement.
Source: (the link to the actual study is in the article)
In 2013, the European Commission ordered a €360,000 ($430,000) study on how piracy affects sales of music, books, movies and games in the EU
Plus this one:
A new report out of the UK once again deflates the common narrative that pirates are exclusively looking to obtain free stuff.
John Rogers was once asked, in a Q&A session, how he felt about people illegally downloading his show. His response:
"I would PREFER you buy the show legally. However, I am one of those capitalists who doesn't blame the market for my failings. The market is the market. The market does not give a shit what's fair. Torrenting is to a great degree a mismatch of delivery systems to audience. When we get better at digital delivery, piracy will decrease. It'll never go away, but being angry at piracy is like being angry at the weather -- in a digital economy, you're gonna have to live with some rain, and if you've built your house correctly it won't wash you away."
You’re not depressed. You just need $250,000 in your bank account.
Reblog to materialize $250,000 in prev's bank account
You'd think "don't use a fictional creature as an allegory for oppressed minorities and as a horde of vile automatons that it's always okay to kill in the same work at the same time" would be a no brainer, but roughly 70% of all works featuring goblins and/or robots demonstrate otherwise.
Star Wars using this exact formula with droids blows my mind to this day. Like, they really can’t decide whether they’re actually an oppressed group or genuinely mindless automatons whose inner lives we don’t need to worry about.
Given that Solo: A Star Wars Story features a droid liberation activist who's very obviously characterised as a mean-spirited parody of a women's rights activist and whose concerns are consistently treated as misguided and laughable (before they blow her up and use her brain to repair a spaceship), I'm not sure it's that the writers they can't decide so much as it that they don't want to say what they really think out loud.
True, but I think droids in star wars are more racialized & have a tendency to draw on the Black civil rights and slavery abolition movements in pretty awful ways. Aforementioned droid in Solo is explicitly looking to abolish droid slavery and is destroyed while liberating droids from a mine (not to mention her being something of a sassy/angry Black woman stereotype).
Going beyond Solo; There is an episode in Rebels where they make the droids sit at the back of the bus and C3PO is positioned as being whiny and annoying for being upset at this treatment. The Clone Wars series is the origin point for "clanker" and it exists in a near-identical way to how imperialist militaries use racial slurs to dehumanize their enemies. There's even the "we don't serve droids here" in the catina in A New Hope. Stepping out of canon and into legends and it can get even more overtly racist. I'm sure if one sat down to actively watch for this there would be more. This is no one writer's issue but baked into the very identity of the series. Droids are sapient machines that are bought and sold, kept in line with memory wipes and restraining bolts, and this must be seen as a morally neutral action by the narrative or we are acknowledging Luke Skywalker as a slave owner.
Yeah, this is easily the worst aspect of worldbuilding in Star Wars.
If you want to keep it vague enough that the droids can plausibly just be very advanced Alexas, or God forbid, even establish in canon that that's all they are, fine.
But if you take the classic sci-fi approach of "robots are people actually," then everybody in the original trilogy, as you say, is a slave owner. And the idea that Rebels/Empire or Jedi/Sith are anything like a struggle between good and evil pretty much evaporates.
It'd be one thing if writers decided that this was a shitty thing they inherited from Lucas and they're just never going to mention it again. But they insist on going back and back to that well, and the more they do it the worse it gets.
Here was a write up of direct results five years later (2021): Five years later, Panama Papers still having a big impact - ICIJ
ICIJ’s massive cross-border investigation remains an influence — and a catchphrase — in politics, business, academia and pop culture, half a
And a similar 10 year update from April 2026: Ten years after the Panama Papers, enablers and tax cheats are still being brought to justice - ICIJ
A look back at a decade of changes after the Pulitzer-Prize winning investigation sent a shock through the offshore world.
And here is an article on the specific ramifications on U.S. tax law and enforcement: Panama Papers 10th Anniversary: U.S. Tax Implications, IRS Results & Compliance Lessons For American Taxpayers - Tax Authorities - United States
April 2026 marks the 10th anniversary of the Panama Papers, one of the largest data leaks in history. The leak exposed how wealthy individua
And a BREAKING UPDATE: The trial of Yorgen Fenech, the man accused of masterminding the assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia (put respect on her name) began on July 1, 2026 and is ongoing - you can go watch coverage of it.
The Degiorgio brothers pleaded guilty to carrying out the bombing and are serving 40-year prison sentences. The two suppliers of the bomb also received life sentences.
Others involved (middlemen, etc) have received a variety of reduced aentences and pardons based on their participation and testimony to take down Yorgen Fenech.
The former prime minister of Malta, Vincent Muscat, resigned and trials are ongoing.
Not to minimize how bad the world currently is, because shits not great, but don't ignore the wins when they actually exist. There ARE steps towards justice, there is still good in the world and people working to correct course. Don't let the gloom of it all jade you from seeing the action and effort that IS happening.

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15 July 1944
Man, I still hope she was right.
I need a polite and effective way to say "hey your heart is truly in the right place and your anger is often righteous but I think sometimes you’re getting recreationally mad about things that are frankly not worth the amount of energy you’re spending on them, and every time you do this you're driving yourself slightly more insane with nothing to show for it," and then I need a way to broadcast that message through a loudspeaker to roughly 30,000 people at once, and THEN I need a time machine to send that message to my past self lol. and maybe a second time machine in case past me tries to be clever and sabotage the version of me who comes through the first time machine