A Wonderful World of Nothing

Courier, hiding in the shadows and about to assassinate him:

August 2015

October 2016

April 2017

July 2017

September 2018

December 2018

June 2019

February 2020

August 2020

May 2021

January 2022

October 2022

April 2023

July 2023

June 2024

February 2025

March 2025

November 2025

August 2026

Like, you have no idea how much that sucks.

I get it, I totally get it. My demo (white men between 45 and 65, more or less) went hardest among all demographics for Shitler and Jeffrey Dahmer Vance, and there is just everything in the world to hate about that.

But the Boomers are our parents, and they are the ones who voted for Nixon, twice. They voted for Reagan, twice. They voted for W Bush, twice. They invented "political correctness" and mastered the art of the racist dog whistle.

They suck so hard, and a whole lot of us in Gen X have spent our entire lives trying to clean up the mess they made.

And I know this comes off as hashtag not all men, but I have to say it: there are so many of us who despise the Boomers, grew up listening to punk rock, hating Reagan and both Bushes, invented Grunge, volunteered for Obama and our local version of Bernie, and feel closer to Millennials than we do our parents. We hate Late Capitalism even more than you do, because we remember a time before the Boomers handed the keys to the oligarchs. We remember a growing economy and a president who wasn't a complete fuckup, surrounded by complete fuckups.

We are on your side, we listen to you and we hear you the way we wanted to be heard. We scold you about Chat GPT because we care about you and don't want you to become functionally illiterate.

I know I'm not the only Old who feels this way. We love you damn kids today, and we're doing our best to support you.

In other words:

RADICAL SATURDAY

Tis indeed! Thank you for this addition. Here are some photo examples of the Googie style.

I was today years old. That is disgusting.

No Child Left Behind is one of the worst things to ever be incentivized in schools. It was signed into law when I was 14. Reading Rainbow was my show as a kid. LeVar Burton played a big part in why I became an avid reader to date. The joy of it. It's an adventure around the globe and through different time periods without stepping on a plane or time machine.

Children parrot behavior. In grade school, I always wanted to read the same amount of books as my teachers (50 books) and managed to double that each year. Before No Child Left Behind, book fairs and Scholastic catalogs were a serious matter like your grandma's Fingerhut catalogs. Libraries were (and still are) a wonderland.

This concentrated schools and other education programs entirely on those tests, especially schools with students who were already struggling, at the cost of art and music programs, home economics and shop type programs, and any in depth exploration of pretty much anything that wasn't on the test, which were pretty narrowly focused. Reading Rainbow was a relaxed encouragement to be imaginative and curious. It didn't teach kids the answers to questions on the test. So it didn't make the cut.

This widened the gap between public and private school educations significantly, because students in public schools learned mostly how to regurgitate information, while students in private schools learned how to understand it, analyze it, think critically about it, and apply it - in short, if you could afford to go to private school, you still got to have agency over your education. And sure, many public school teachers were dedicated and still taught their students more than the curriculum demanded, but they were under a lot of pressure and scrutiny and their hands were often tied. Many of them couldn't sustain the effort it took (and how little they got paid) and changed careers. Meanwhile basic necessarily skills disappeared when arts and non-academic budgets were slashed into oblivion - you used to be able to learn how to sew, mend, cook, budget, do woodworking, fix a car (hell, build one), paint, draw, do pottery, and so much more in elective classes. What's mostly remained is performing arts programs, which struggle to continue existing, but since you can charge admission to performances they've had a better chance than shop class and home ec.

You have no idea what it's like to have watched all that happen under the Bush administration and now see the second emerging generation of young people who were deprived of the education they deserve and don't understand critical thought or media analysis. Those of us who are old enough to remember the Bush era are frustrated, but not at all surprised to see how reductive and binary fandom discourse is, or that critical media analysis has diminished significantly and turned into fandom discourse instead (ie. that being a child during the "what you feel is more valid than facts" Bush administration has led to the second emerging generation of people who struggle to separate their personal feelings about a piece of media from the idea that fiction is social commentary, who struggle to understand nuance and are more concerned about judging others for their even slightly divergent political views than about what makes for effective activism, or that fandom has become a way for people to judge and condemn others).

You have no idea how terrifying it is to have watched No Child Left Behind unfold in your early 20s and have thought "this is going to lead to generations of kids who will be ripe for manipulation by propaganda" and to now watch how hard it is to get Gen Z and Alpha to understand the ways they're being manipulated by fascists. Believe me when I say the very real purpose of forcing education to focus on tests instead of knowledge was to create generations of people whose brains are trained at an early age to accept information unquestioningly. That's what I see when people reblog screenshots without sources and base their political opinions on tumblr funnymen.

But I do have a question — “sight words”?? I don’t even know how to ask my question besides what the fuck does that even mean??

Is that, like, “learn sequence of symbols = word” over “symbols = letters && letters combine to make words”?

I just…how…how does one do that?

“How to make cats and dogs happy at the same time”

imagine if you walked into a room and there was a button on the wall. you’d want to press it and see what happened. if it did something like make a beep or change the lights, most people will immediately press it again in response, testing out whether it happens again, or what the pattern is.

so the cat is like, huh, wonder what happens if i do this - and then it gets a Big Reaction! it is having a major impact on its environment! cool! wonder if it happens every time? OH IT DOES! this is fun!

does this serve any purpose other than to make the publisher feel like they're Doing Something, and to help consumers feel like their purchases are meaningful political engagement?

I’m going to tell you about how a discord banner that was put up for pride month in the Lancer ttrpg official discord was so successful at getting bigots to out themselves, that it’s been the permanent official discord banner for 4 years now.

This is the updated version. It’s animated now.

But pride month 4 or 5 years ago, somebody made the server banner a Goblin mech dabbing in front of a trans flag.

And for your average person who joined the server, they just kinda went, lol cool.

For the trans people who joined the server, it made them feel extra safe.

And for the bigots who joined the server? They’d fucking bitch about it IMMEDIATELY. And promptly get banned.

And that month saw so many bannings of dipshits that they decided to keep that banner, because every single time a bigot joins the server, there is a high chance that they will out themselves IMMEDIATELY and be promptly banned.

While including text like this in a book is different than a community space, the reality is, fascists do not like being embarrassed or confronted about their beliefs; they have fragile egos.

So imagine you are going through the book with a group of friends, and you get to this block about “fascism bad,” and somebody is like, “I don’t know how I feel about this. It seems a bit stupid,” it immediately gets to raise a red flag for everybody that maybe this person isn’t, as cool to have at the table as they thought.

Similarly, you know how many bigots went and burned their beers/hats/shoes because some corporation supported trans people/gay people/Collin Kapernick?

This is performative, yes. But it’s not performative to puff up themselves as heroes. It’s performative, aimed right at the fragile skinned assholes who will boycott Oreos and Budweiser for “supporting the gays.”

It’s one of the FASTEST ways to reduce the number of virulent bigots in a community for ZERO COST.

Like, maybe the experience of the lancer discord is atypical, and fascists are learning to have thicker skins and lie about their beliefs better.

It’s still PROFOUNDLY CHEAP AND EASY to include this blurb.

So, it’s free, zero effort nazi repellent.

Frankly with that in mind, I’d regard anybody who ISNT doing this, as maybe a tiny bit cowardly.

It may be atypical but it's certainly not unique. Another example is the Heraldry discord I'm on, with an icon that is animated to switch its original colours and two other versions, displaying gay pride and transgender pride colours.

Bigots join, bigots mouth off, bigots get banned.

Sometimes we get a different flavour of bigot, ones who tolerate us queers but are racist as hell. They tend to out themselves, too, because it's a heraldry server. That fact alone makes them assume that we're all "European culture is best" and other racist bullshit. They get banned.

And that is TACTICALLY USEFUL.

Because game companies spend so much money moderating chat spaces (both forums and in-game chats) and they lose so much business when dominant third party online spaces associated with their game turn toxic. Hell moderation is the big money sink for social media. Managing that cost is one of the most difficult aspects of the business.

Now imagine telling a game or social media executive that you can eliminate half of their harassment in a single honeypot operation. Imagine telling them that you have a technique which surgically targets a majority of their most toxic members and immediately gets rid of them. Because that's what this is.

You slap up a big pride or power banner and an announcement that this company stands with [insert group here], or stands against fascism, and you take names on everybody who has angry or quibbling shit to say about that. And then you ban them all. And just like that the moderation load you're dealing with gets so much lighter. Keep it up with a similar announcement whenever a topical opportunity presents itself and you clean out any new trash which walks in too.

And it just so happens that the way to do this is to clear out the bigots and make a safe space for oppressed groups.

There are so many of these companies which are worried that by taking a stand like this they will hurt their user base. There are so many forums online with volunteer moderators who reflexively don't want to wait into politics because they think that will increase their workload. Give them good solid practical examples of this reducing their workload instead, and you will get some of them onboard.