Stardust & Scotch

Kurt's songwriting journals: "I'd be able to be happy if I was a woman. I wish I could grow breasts. People are really mean to women and I identify with their struggles heavily for some reason. Probably nothing to do with *whatever* has led to my deep, inescapable depression. Being forced to be a man is killing me."

The people who knew Kurt: "Wow he'd really have loved this yuri manga stuff, especially this one called the boy she was interested in wasn't a boy at all."

Instead of cursing her to an eternal sleep or death, Maleficent declares that the princess will grow up to betray the kingdom and serve her instead. So the king sends Aurora away, but one day the young adventurous girl strays a bit too far and right into her territory.

ALL DOGS ARE PRECIOUS.

It is a weapon

look, when i was a kid i was passionately in love with the idea of robots--that humans would one day create another sort of intelligence to share our world with-- and believed very firmly that we should respect and protect all our robot friends from the start, so there would be no violent humans-against-robots revolution or anything.

anyway it turns out that the people trying to keep end-stage capitalism running are really banking on us feeling more love for the robots than for the kind of people they're going to be using the robots to oppress.

so like. maybe lets all agree right now that if a robot is being used to hurt a person, you need to smash the fucking robot. they're going to make the robots really cute. they're going to show us so many movies about how much robots need to be loved. and then they are going to use robots to hurt people.

Boston Dynamics publicly condemned the project for using its robot “in any way that cpromotes violence, harm, or intimidation.” The day after Spot’s Rampage debuted, Boston Dynamics rolled out a partnership with the NYPD.

Anyway, I have seen these robot dogs in person at a conference, and it took under a minute for my brain to go "Doggo! Friend shaped!" When I stepped back and thought about it, it was unnerving as HELL.

I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.

Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.

I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.

I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.

Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.

I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.

My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.

I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?

I'm a music teacher and I think about this ALL THE TIME. There are basically no songs now that everyone knows. (Aside from like... The National anthem??? Happy birthday???)

On one hand I love that more niche artists are getting bigger platforms and are able to find and connect with their audiences. On the other hand, especially after the pandemic, there are tons of kids who literally don't even know Row Row Row Your Boat or Twinkle Twinkle. And I worry deeply all the time about what that does! When you can't sing together. When none of your friends listen to the same music you do. When you don't have any stories or songs or art that gives you a shared connection and identity and meaning. When art becomes something you consume privately rather than something that is shared, something communal.

This guy just becomes ever more relevant as time goes on

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TRAP CARD ACTIVATED

No, but seriously, anon, you need to look into what's going on in his classroom because he's probably being taught this trash method instead of phonics. He does not know how to slow down and sound things out because his school has never taught him that. When you tell him to do this, he has no context for what you're even talking about.

This has come up repeatedly here, and I don't have time to froth at the mouth today, but look up "whole language".

This podcast made waves a few years ago when all the lockdown parents discovered, to their horror, that their kiddos weren't being taught to read in the NORMAL FUCKING WAY WE'VE USED FOR LITERALLY CENTURIES and were instead being taught a fake-ass method backed by vibes and antivax-levels of pseudoscience.

But of course it feels intuitively sensible to her. She taught herself to read at age 2. That's the exact kind of experience that does make this method sound reasonable. But like you say, if it's going to happen, it happens very early and without the school curriculum.

As for me, I've said it before, but I assume anon wasn't around: I could not learn to read.

I was in second grade. (First grade? I can't remember. Around then.) Most of my classmates were reading at least a little. Me: nothing. I could not learn.

It was even a god damn private school, but I had to have a fucking tutor. I got dragged over to that lady's office a few days a week for... two months? Four months? It really wasn't that long, as far as I know. I was more than ready to learn. I just needed an actual fucking method that wasn't lying trash. Almost at once I jumped from nothing to reading well above grade level. For the rest of my childhood, I continued to diverge from my classmates in how many words I knew, how well I could read, the works. Every year of grade school makes that gap widen. I was on the desirable side of that gap. I was lucky.

It's obvious how verbal I am from reading my tl;dr on this blog.

But I could not learn to read.

John Knefel at MMFA:

Following her release from prison last month, former Colorado election official Tina Peters has hit the ground running with more than 17 appearances in right-wing media. During her media tour, Peters has spread numerous conspiracy theories about supposed voter fraud and foreign interference in elections, while repeatedly boasting about advising President Donald Trump on how to fix the purported problem. Peters — who was released following commutation of her sentence on charges related to 2020 election conspiracy theories — has claimed that she urged Trump to issue executive orders that could severely curtail voting rights during a White House meeting and argued that Trump should unilaterally ban the use of voting machines and mail-in ballots, actions that would almost certainly be challenged in court.

Peters and her lawyer, Peter Ticktin, met with Trump on June 30, seemingly as part of an emerging plot to subvert the midterm elections. According to CNN, Ticktin, who also claims to be the president’s childhood best friend, is pressing Trump to issue “an executive order to effectively seize federal control of the upcoming midterms by declaring a national emergency based on alleged foreign interference through electronic voting machines,” and is involved in drafting a proposed EO toward that end. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, a vocal supporter of Peters, and others on his War Room podcast have spent weeks calling for Trump to take those exact actions.

Peters’ right-wing media tour: “Get rid of the machines” 

Peters, a former Mesa County clerk, looms large among MAGA media figures who deny the results of the 2020 election. Following a pressure campaign by Trump, Colorado’s Democratic Gov. Jared Polis commuted Peters’ nine-year sentence, ostensibly on free speech grounds, a decision publicly opposed by two members of the commutation board. (Polis then fired them for speaking out.) Media Matters found Peters has made at least 17 appearances in right-wing media programs or events since her release on June 1, including an interview that day on Bannon’s show. During a June 24 fundraiser for herself, Peters said that “Trump called me the other day,” and later added: “I believe Trump could sign an executive order to get rid of the machines.”

On an appearance the same day on The Alex Jones Show, Peters reiterated that Trump “called me” and again argued that the president “should do an executive order to ban electronic voting machines across the nation.” She also alleged that “there were parts made in China” in the equipment she’d seen. (There is no public evidence of foreign interference in the 2020 election.) The next day, Peters appeared on the Joel Oltmann Untamed podcast, where she repeated and broadened her recommendation to Trump. “We’ve got to get rid of the machines,” Peters said. “President Trump needs to sign an executive order —”

“And the mail-in ballots,” host Joel Oltmann interjected. “And the mail-in ballots,” Peters agreed, “Saying it’s unconstitutional that these things are allowed to be done. There’s no security threshold when you have foreign agents that have proprietary authority, power, over the things that are used for our most sacred right, which is to vote who we want to represent us.” Peters also said Trump asked her to “get me the info.” On a June 28 appearance on Faith & Freedom, Peters said that “we have to get rid of the machines. The machines don’t have any transparency; they are flipping votes.”

Then on July 2, Peters went on a livestream and described her White House meeting with Trump. “We are, right now, you know, with meeting the president yesterday, giving him a real solution to how to stop what’s happening.” “There is a plan,” Peters said. “Yesterday, when I was with the president, he talked — and I can’t get into the plan — but we talked, he basically said to his lead counsel to do what I was asking.” Peters repeated that read out of her meeting on July 5 in an interview on The Roger Stone Show. “I just met with President Trump, and I told him, I said, sir, Mr. President, we have four months … We are going to lose the election if we don’t get rid of the machines,” Peters said. She added: “We have a plan going forward, I spoke to the president about it, and I’m hopeful that something can be done.” What exactly that “something” is remains to be seen, but the last few weeks have provided some clues, and it looks a lot like what Peters’ own lawyer is advocating.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

not 9-5 but more and involves unpaid overtime

a LOT more difficult and mentally taxing than e.g. what it was like for the boomer generation. we do a lot more work in a certain timeframe

also a lot more underpaid

constantly held in fear of homelessness and starvation

all of these contribute to the phenomena above