Doot Doot

I love the Comic Swipes Facebook page.

but also.

here is a fact: kids want to connect to people.

and right now, the only real way to do that, for many, is online.

it's not just the unwalkability of us neighborhoods. it's not just the restrictions by parents on where and how their kids can move.

first of all, offline spaces for kids are few and far between, and when they do exist, kids are often prohibited from accessing them by parents. i wasn't allowed to walk to my local library on my own until i was twelve or thirteen. (to be clear, it was under a mile away, i had the ability to contact them via a smart watch, and i'd been there before.)

and in the us in particular, there often aren't things within walking/biking distance. that library i mentioned was all of one room, was typically unaccessible (open tuesday, thursday and saturday; twenty-one hours a week, with 14 hours and 10 minutes, tops, being actually accessible given the high school hours). glancing around the neighborhood now, i could walk to such exciting places as (checks google maps) a notary, several places to do one's taxes, a gas station, or a paint store. to be fair, there is also a walkable playground, more pizza places than seems possible for a town of that size to support, and a swimming pool, but on days with bad weather (and this is pittsburgh, so a fair number of days) that aren't tuesday and thursday, a kid growing up there, even if allowed, and even if there are sidewalks, wouldn't be able to do much (not without the relentless shadow of consumerism hanging over them at the pizza places, anyway.)

now, let's compare my grandparents' home when i was growing up. glancing around on google maps, it looks like there's even less. seriously, it looks like a soulcrushing dystopia from above. where the fuck is a kid who lives there supposed to go to hang out with friends? walgreens?

meanwhile, for many queer kids, access to online spaces is a lifeline -- literally, sometimes. being able to know you're not alone is incredibly powerful, being able to know that there are words for what you are beyond whatever slurs your parents/society calls you is powerful.

people don't tell the stories of those kids, because it's in no one's interest. the big corporate companies don't want to offend anyone, so they're not going to highlight the story of the queer kid who realized they were queer via social media. and goodness knows the parents aren't going to be publicizing that story.

are there real and valid dangers social media poses? yes. absolutely.

i said this in the tags of another post, and i'm slightly reworking it:

if you're a queer kid in a queerphobic environment, the internet can be incredibly helpful. furthermore, the way these rules work, either only big tech will be able to afford age-gating, or people will migrate to smaller forums and then the lawmakers will panic and extend it over them as well. and I'm younger than some of the big tech companies. I don't remember an era without social media. the first website where I really interacted with other people in a way that wasn't specifically aimed at kids, I was probably twelve, and it was the comments section of a website went down about six months after I joined. it was a tiny community, the posts were infrequent, and it was held together, so far as I can tell, by sheer optimism. I loved it. fuck, I still do. I adored it. it showed me what the internet could be.

yeah, maybe the space wasn't intentional. yeah, maybe it wasn't made for human connection. so what? that's the beauty of those spaces. human communication networks are like dandelions -- they spring up, and, no matter how hard people try to get rid of them, they just. keep. coming. they will grow from a crack in the sidewalk.

and there will always, always, be a crack in the sidewalk.

anyway, as dragon-in-a-fez mentioned somewhere else, enjoy Ageless Linux.

Anyway apparently Mr. Eclipse made 5000 years' worth of solar eclipse graphics, which you can find the simpler versions of here

One of my favourite illustrations of this was in a First Aid class. The instructor was a working paramedic. He asked, “Who here knows the stats on CPR? What percentage of people are saved by CPR outside a hospital?”

I happen to know but I’m trying not to be a TOTAL know it all in this class so I wait. And people guess 50% and he says, “Lower,” and 20% and so forth and eventually I sort of half put up my hand and I guess I had The Face because he eventually looked at me and said, “You know, don’t you.”

“My mom’s a doc,” I said. He gave me a “so say it” gesture and I said, “Four to ten percent depending on your sources.”

Everyone else looked surprised and horrified.

And the paramedic said, “We’re gonna talk a bit about some details of those figures* but first I want to talk about just this: when do you do CPR?”

The class dutifully replies: when someone is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse.

“What do we call someone who is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse?”

The class tries to figure out what the trick question is so I jump over the long pause and say, “A corpse.”

“Right,” says the paramedic. “Someone who isn’t breathing and has no heartbeat is dead. So what I’m telling you is that with this technique you have a 4-10% chance of raising the dead.”

So no, artists did not stop the Vietnam War from happening with the sheer Power of Art. The forces driving that military intervention were huge, had generations of momentum and are actually pretty damn complicated.

But if you think the mass rejection of the war was as meaningless as a soufflé - well.

Try sitting here for ten seconds and imagining where we’d be if the entire intellectual and artistic drive of the culture had been FOR the war. If everyone thought it was a GREAT IDEA.

What the whole world would look like.

Four-to-ten percent means that ninety to ninety-six percent of the time - more than nine times out of ten - CPR will do nothing, but that one time you’ll be in the company of someone worshipped as an incarnate god.

If you think the artists and performers attacking and showing up people like Donald Trump is meaningless try imagining a version of the world wherein they weren’t there.

Yes, it’s just a pie. Yes, the pie itself doesn’t do much direct damage in the grand scheme of things. But the pie is resistance, and resistance inspires resistance. Resistance inspires survival. Throwing pies sometimes starts a movement. Throwing pies sometimes saves lives.

And of course, we haven’t spoken about the inherent morality of throwing pies at oppressors in a world where oppressors have outlawed pie throwing. At the very least, pie throwing is a reminder to the oppressors that no matter how much money they have, no matter how much power they have, there are still some people, some moments they can’t control.

Imagine sitting in a packed auditorium and some asshole is up front is spouting bullshit about minorites. Like saying they’re filthy and deserve a violent death etc. And there are lots of people nodding along and even cheering and applauding

But no one is saying or doing anything to disagree, so you think that you’re the only one who opposes the speaker. And you don’t want to say anything because you don’t want their ire or violence to be aimed at you

So you go through the entire speech, and possibly your entire life, thinking you’re alone

BUT if just one person has the courage to speak up, to throw a pie, to project art on the screen behind the speaker, then that single act of resistance will inspire others to do the same. It could even inspire you to stand up. Or if you’re the first, then you can inspire others

3.75% of the entire country was in the streets on Saturday. Might not sound like a lot, but those are the kind of numbers that signal a toppling government or a revolution.

She was a homophobic celebrity.

That joke from Airplane.

She got pied in the face.

Lotta people my age, and even more so the Zoomers, don’t even know the joke from Airplane. Fewer and fewer people even know who Anita Bryant was, or what her views on LGBT folk were. But this is the Information Age, this is the age of meme culture, so that pie in the face? It’s going to live on. Not forever, but longer than anything else about her. After people have forgotten her very name, they’ll remember that meme. Her legacy for the rest of her life and for long thereafter will be an Internet meme at her own expense.

“I was naked for a day. You will be naked for eternity.”

And I want to be feminine like this:

Point of order.

King of Horses ran 450 fucking miles at almost entirely a gallop, without more than a few minutes rest, in 4 nights and basically was like "wait why are we stopping?" when Gandalf took him into the city and he ended up in a stable.

This was not his top speed, nor did it push any limits on his endurance.

Find out your companion here *jazz hands*

Do you love them? Do you hate them?