I post a bit of everything here. I'll occasionally chime in on science or engineering subjects and I'm a huge space and rocketry dork.Ā Avatar by @cottaterra.
So, Cheeseburger died on November 21st after an unfairly short battle with an unfairly rare cancer that is rarely seen in cats. I only got to spend a month with him after his diagnosis, and losing him has been the greatest heartbreak of my entire life so far. He was my best friend and my soul cat, and he was there for me when I was completely alone, for twelve long years.
I made this transparent PNG the night he died in preparation for one of the many ways I was going to memorialize him--a surface rug in his likeness that I planned on laying directly in the line of his favourite sunbeam. And I uploaded that PNG here, because this is the website where people post their cats.
I was not expecting the reception I got. Many people have pointed out that this post has more reblogs than likes, and how insane that is in 2025 when reblog culture is at an all time low. I didn't even talk about the fact that Burger passed away in the original post, it wasn't a tearjerker reblog bait or anything like that. People just loved Burger that much, in the same way I fell in love with him at first sight. He was such an ugly kitten.
Anyways, it's really special to me that so many people have reblogged my best friend. I made this PNG to memorialize him in a completely different way, and you all wound up doing just that in ways I never even imagined.
Thank you. Wherever he is, I know the sun is shining.
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Originally, I went in worried the opposite would happen. Growing up, I've been taught that Nigeria, the country, is homophobic. (I was born in America.) But over time, I learned that there's tons of other queer Nigerians; some are out, and some are in the closet š.
Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.
At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and itās not to watch the shoppers. See, we canāt actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.
At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didnāt exist in my household. Itās normal now. Here is something that is not for me.
āWhat the hell, Iāll take another,ā says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.
The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.
I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. Heās not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. Heās not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadnāt spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldnāt have spent any. I go home. I donāt own a watch.
I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.
I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht.Ā
i wrote this while i was working at orlandoās walt disney world parks.
i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.
as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.
disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (ācast membersā) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even āfaceā characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.
at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.
i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.
i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.
Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as āproblematicā in class and our professor was like, āThatās cool, but āproblematicā doesnāt really mean anything. It means that the thing youāre describing has a problem, and in and of itself thatās not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else itās not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like youāre trying to say that this is bad, but you donāt want to say ābad.ā Is that right?ā
So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the ābadā thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, āIām uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.ā
Once we stopped calling things āproblematicā and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, āthatās racistā or āthatās misogynisticā or āew capitalism grossā out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, āUhhh... Iām not sure whatās so bad?ā and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.
Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I canāt help but think of this professor being like, āGood starting point, now letās get specific.ā I think when we have to commit to saying āthatās ___ā it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever weāre claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes itās art, and it should be full of problems, because thatās what art is.
#'this is present in the text' is often a good first step #but those second and third ones (naming it; describing its function) are vital (via @elucubrare)
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For those who don't know: Ikumi Nakamura is the woman who was senior artist on Bayonetta, and designed the titular character along with Hideki Kamiya. Their greatest moment of bonding was over their insistence that Bayonetta keep her glasses on at all times.
Nakamura cannot go to horny jail. She is the warden.
#not to woke out on this fun post #but i do find it profoundly weird that it's normalized to react to a person harmlessly expressing sexual desire #for a character KNOWN to be widely considered attractive #with "you deserve violence and jail time for being horny haha. we should beat you with sticks" #like the underlying implications of the whole horny jail and related memes just feels too ominious for me to enjoy #like im glad she finds it funny. but why the fuck is it seen as normal to send a meme like that to a stranger? #"we said no horny" ON THE INTERNET??? ABOUT THE GIANT BIG TIDDY VAMPIRE LADY?????
i think more people should learn to sit with the discomfort of knowing their favorite media has problematic elements. i think more people should learn to examine their favorite media critically and acknowledge that these elements are there. i think more people should look at these elements and say "hey, so that was badly handled and I'm not going to incorporate that into my belief system" rather than "oh god, this media is irredeemable and I can't like it or I'm a bad person" or "oh, so actually this element doesn't exist/isn't problematic at all so I can like it in peace" because i seriously think the last 2 are kind of . dangerous . for us to get caught up in
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Once I said "My gender is whatever's funniest at the time" and my coworker stops dead in his tracks, turns slowly and says "So are your pronouns honk/honk?" killing me instantly
I was talking to a friend I knew before I transitioned about my new relationship (my first one ever!) and I said "Yeah, I think I only indentified as aro/ace most of my life because I didn't have lesbian as an option" and he looked me dead in the eye and said "Oh? Why not? ...Ohhh"
Then he said "You know, I completely forgot you weren't always this way. Femininity really suits you" and let me tell you I started tearing up
Of course, not ten minutes later I mentioned that I had to relearn how to sing and he said "oh no, what happened?" so he might just be a little slow
Update on that friend: a bunch of people sent me "he's a little confused, but he's got the spirit" gifs in response to that story. I can tell you now with certainty that she definitely has the spirit, and she's not confused anymore
A recent Supreme Court decision threatens a core democratic principle.
The Supreme Court dealt a massive blow to the ongoing struggle for racial justice in the United States with its April decision, Louisiana v. Callais, significantly weakening Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. That provision of the landmark legislation prohibited voting practices that were racially discriminatory. In 1982, a bipartisan coalition in Congress strengthened the law further by stipulating that plaintiffs only needed to demonstrate a discriminatory racial impact, rather than prove racist intent.
With Callais, the Supreme Court overturned Congressās earlier judgement and now requires proof of racist intent rather than discriminatory effect, which raises the bar dramatically for the federal government to act. Within weeks, several Southern states quickly moved to redraw district maps, with legislatures in states such as Tennessee targeting Black-majority districts that long elected Black and Democratic legislators. Democrats warn that, as a result, one-third of the Congressional Black Caucus, a group of Black lawmakers founded in 1971 in the wake of the Voting Rights Act, could lose their seats.
The decision threatens a core democratic principle, āone-man, one-vote,ā that a very different Supreme Court entrenched through a series of landmark rulings between 1962 and 1964. Under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, whom Republican President Dwight Eisenhower appointed in 1953, those decisions rose from a rejection of the entrenched, often corrupt Southern electoral systems in which districts for state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives disproportionately favored sparsely populated white rural areas over more diverse (socially and politically) urban constituencies. The latter typically included larger Black populations and were more supportive of civil rights.
Partisan gerrymandering is almost as old as the United States itself.
For most of U.S. history, political parties have crafted districts designed to benefit their own interests. The term itself is named after Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts, who in 1812 authorized a bizarre state senate district that looked like a salamander. Since the early 19th century, through the redistricting process that follows each new Census, voters have been packed into districts that would elect candidates from the party in power. Sometimes state officials in bipartisan states reached deals so that each side could enjoy the benefits of safe seats.
But partisan gerrymandering took on a distinct racial character in the South, where Democrats dominated. Liberal Democrats viewed redistricting reform as essential to advancing civil rights. Although their primary focus was the South, northern states such as New York and Illinois also maintained districts at the state and federal level that favored rural areas, bolstering conservative power.
By the 1950s, prominent northern Democratic politicians were calling for systematic change. The United States had been transformed by urbanization and industrialization, they argued, yet state legislatures kept district boundaries untouched. āThe popular character of the House has been destroyed,ā argued Minnesota Rep. Eugene McCarthy in 1952, āby the failure of the state legislatures to provide for Congressional districts of approximately the same population and by the practice of electing Congressmen at large.ā
In 1958, then-Sen. John F. Kennedy wrote a New York Times column titled āShame of the Citiesā in which he said: āOf all the discriminations against the urban areas, the most fundamental and the most blatant is political: the apportionment of representation in our Legislatures and (to a lesser extent) in Congress has been either deliberately rigged or shamefully ignored so as to deny the cities and their voters that full and proportionate voice in government to which they are entitled. ⦠At one time, in a then largely rural nation, legislative strength was heavily weighted in favor of rural areas. Though times have changed, many Legislatures have not.ā A liberal coalition that included the AFL-CIO, the Americans for Democratic Action, the League of Women Voters, and the American Civil Liberties Union championed reform.
But the conservative coalition of Southern Democratic committee chairmen and Midwestern Republicans who had controlled the chambers since the 1938 midterm elections blocked any legislative progress. In the U.S. House, some of the most notorious conservative Southern barons of the committee system counted on being reelected from districts with sparse numbers of voters, most of whom had little appetite for the civil rights movement that was shaking the region.
The responsibility for action ultimately fell to the federal courts. Chief Justice Warren had come to believe that equitable apportionment could have saved the nation āacute racial troublesā by assuring that every personās vote carried equal weight. Although Black southerners had generally been disenfranchised under the Jim Crow system imposed after Reconstruction, those who had been able to register to vote were often at a disadvantage because of where they lived. Moreover, if the struggle for voting rights legislation was successful, the composition of districts would work against the political progress that would otherwise be made.
Within the Supreme Court, there had been strong opposition to intervening in anything connected to elections. The federal courts were wary of what Justice Felix Frankfurter famously called the āpolitical thicket.ā Because the Constitution left elections to the states, earlier justices had concluded that the court had no authority to step in. They also doubted whether the judiciary could define a clear, workable standard for the states to follow. If he and his colleagues attempted to resolve these thorny issues, warned Justice John Marshall Harlan II, Americans might even begin scrutinizing the āpolitical backgrounds or ideologiesā of the Supreme Court justices themselves.
But the pressure from the civil rights movement continued to mount. A coalition in Tennessee argued that the state had failed to reapportion seats for the lower chamber of the state legislature, the General Assembly, since 1901. Not only did the state constitution require reapportionment every 10 years, but demographic changes had also rendered the old district lines inequitable. Their lawyers argued that the districts violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment which deemed that states had to treat people the same way. Laws that discriminated on the basis of race were thus unconstitutional.
In 1962, the Supreme Court ruled in Baker v. Carr that the courts could make decisions about these issues and legitimated the claims of the plaintiffs about the violation of the equal protection clause. Tennesseeās apportionment scheme violated the 14th Amendment because it diluted the vote of urban residents. Justice William Brennan, writing for the majority (which included Warren as well as Justices Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Tom C. Clark, and Potter Stewart), held that such disparities constituted a denial of equal protection. The court remanded the case, sending it back to the lower court for a final decision. Even so, the ruling became a landmark because it established that the court could intervene in apportionment disputes when citizens were denied equal protection under the 14th Amendment. Within months, over 30 suits were filed. āThe rush through the door unlocked by Baker v. Carr,ā observed one expert, āhas been staggering.ā
Baker v. Carr energized supporters of civil rights to demand more. Soon after the decision, the courtās chief opponent of federal intervention, Felix Frankfurter, retired following a stroke. Then-President Kennedy appointed Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg to the court, a justice far more sympathetic to Baker v. Carr. The impact was immediate. A Georgia businessman, James O. Sanders, sued the state to overturn its county unit system, which systematically undermined Black political representation. A federal court agreed, declaring that the system could not be justified in the wake of the Supreme Courtās decision. Jimmy Carter, then a peanut farmer and former Navy engineer running for a seat in the state legislature, later recalled the decision and its aftermath as a turning point in Southern politics: āThis was the major news item to be read and discussed at our peanut warehouse, at church, at Lions Club meetings, and in the small county newspapers.ā
The next case shifted the focus from state legislatures to the federal government, centering on districts for the U.S. House of Representatives. In Wesberry v. Sanders (1964), the court ruled that Georgiaās congressional districts were unconstitutional. Plaintiffs from the 5th District argued that their district had nearly the population of the stateās smallest, the 9th, yet both elected only one representative. This diluted the votes of 5th District residents. In a 6-3 decision, the Warren Court held that congressional districts must be drawn to be roughly equal in population so that each personās vote carried the same weight. According to the majority, led by Justice Black, āIt would defeat the principle solemnly embodied in the Great Compromiseāequal representation in the House for equal numbers of peopleāfor us to hold that, within the States, legislatures may draw the lines of congressional districts in such a way as to give some voters a greater voice in choosing a Congressman than others.ā
Baker v. Carr legitimized judicial intervention in apportionment. Wesberry v. Sanders extended the āone-man, one voteā principle to districts for the U.S. House. In another 1964 case, Reynolds v. Sims, the court ruled that both chambers of state legislatures had to be determined according to population.
The revolution in judicial thinking meshed with the landmark legislation passed by the Democratic Congress in 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, that committed the federal government to ensuring that states did not violate the 15th Amendment, the Reconstruction amendment that protected the right of all (male) citizens to vote. As Black registration rapidly increased in the South after 1965, reapportioned districts that were drawn in response to the Supreme Court decisions ensured that the new votes would be treated the same way as white votes in rural communities.
Democrats also blocked efforts by congressional conservatives such as Virginia Democrat William Tuck, who attempted to pass legislation stripping the courts of their ability to intervene in apportionment cases. Although the measure won support in the House, it failed in the Senate.Ā Liberals likewise blocked a proposed constitutional amendment from Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen that would have reversed the court decisionās rulings on state government. The American Jewish Congress opposed Dirksenās proposal, arguing that the effort to reverse the Courtās decisions was an attack on ādemocratic principle.ā Ultimately, Dirksen was defeated.
In 1969, in Allen v. State Board of Elections, the Supreme Court ruled that vote dilution fell within the scope of the Voting Rights Act. Under this interpretation, the Department of Justice gained authority under Section 5 to deal with inequitable districting in addition to the denial of the vote. Federal āpreclearanceā would be necessary for any changes to voting, even matters that appeared technical or procedural. Over the following decades, rural-dominated districts were dismantled, and the number of metropolitan and urban districts steadily increased.
By the end of the decade, the transformation of legislative representation was complete. It didnāt come as a surprise that Warren would later call Baker v. Carr the āmost vitalā decision of his tenure.
The legacy of the Warren Court is now hanging by a thread. The immense progress that had been made in the 1960s tackling the problem of systemic racism within the electoral system has lost massive ground. A series of Supreme Court decisions, as well as legislation and court decisions in red states, have expanded voting restrictions and are now leading to a dangerous acceleration of the redistricting wars where long-standing concerns about racial justice are losing their hold.
In addition to the obvious political ramifications of the new congressional maps, the erosion of representative values that these developments portend have already sent the country backwards in the struggle to make U.S. democracy whole.
One time I was talking about Robin Hood with some coworkers and one guy was like āhe was bad because the people he helped learned to expect handoutsā and I wanted to be like⦠okay can you explain how that flawed capitalist propaganda applies to feudalism
Thatās an exaggeration. What was invented in the 16th century was mercantilism. Capitalism really dates for the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the rise of industry and cash crops over artisans and merchants. Vulture capitalism, with the notion that companies have no duties other than generating profit, is even younger.
I think a lot of this comes from the fact that most people donāt know the formal definition of capitalism. We all know the word, weāve all seen the jokes, but very few people bother to actually define it unless theyāre talking about political theory and philosophy, so itās easy to end up with the impression that Capitalism = Money Can Be Exchanged For Goods And Services.
Capitalism is the economic system where most of the means of production (i.e. everything people need to have to make the stuff that everyone wants) are owned by private individuals or corporations, who then hire people to provide the labor necessary to produce things, with the intent of selling the output at a profit. Itās the difference between āyouāre a carpenter and you make a chair and you sell itā and āyouāre Richard Q. Richington who owns a chair factory, and you pay people to sell the chairs you paid other people to make and then all the excess money goes back to you.ā There have been Richard Q. Richingtons on and off throughout history, but that being the norm for every single industry is a pretty recent development.
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So as it turns out your sense of self doesnt exist in a vacuum. You gotta actually use it and bounce it off of other people like echolocation to see where you are as a person and shit. So if you dont regularly interact with other people the echoes just get weaker and weaker and before you know it your personality is a blurry fucked up fog clone of its former self. which it sucks because this makes it really hard to interact with people again but yknow
In spite of my constant appeals to science and rationality, and in addition to the whole "I dunno, man, it felt p. real to me" deal which is the final refuge of all mentally unwell mystics, I'll never use terms like atheist or skeptic to describe myself b/c I've got fed up with seeing them deployed as thought-terminating cliches implying (or just outright saying) that the non-existence of something makes it inherently unworthy of further study. I dunno if it's much of a problem in serious discourse but it happens Way Too Much in popular discussions and I'm crabby. A whole lot of y'all are trying to combat anti-intellectualism backwards by just participating in it like some sort of pedagogical Filthy Frank. I'm someone who likes stories, and I'm interested in the history of stories and the roles they play within society, and also I sell them for money, so of course this is something I think too much about.
Like. If you think nobody should ever bother studying or analyzing or writing about things that aren't real and don't exist, then that presents us with a whole lot of very serious problems because here is an incomplete list of things that (I, the nihilist, must insist) aren't real and don't exist: Money. Governments. Countries. The rule of law. Languages. Mathematics. Gender. Music. Consciousness. And so on.
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