Paladin of Cats

no matter how normalised it gets I will die on the hill that it is rude to record strangers in public without their consent

This is actually fucking insanely horrifying what the fuck

do you ever think about how if all the world could agree to make a total of one third of our oceans into no fishing zones we would have more seafood than we could ever hope to eat

do you ever think about how if we (in the US) began restoring a percentage of monoculture farms on the great plains back into diverse prairie grasslands complete with restored herds of bison the impact would be not only increased biodiversity (something essential to maintaining life on earth for everyone) but also vastly increased carbon sequestration and all the bison meat we could possibly consume

There seems to be a real chance of Trump dying on camera. Trying to remember a recent photo of him where he’s fully conscious.

Struck by lightning during the White House UFC fight would be a good laugh.

the way teenagers are treated these days is wild. when i was a teenager we were all watching porn, jerking off, and going to horror movies with 3000 gallons of blood. Nowadays they make kids get a permission slip to watch anything darker than Barney the Dinosaur. Insane.

Every year we infantilize teenagers more and more and act surprised when they grow up to be terrified, angry, emotionally stunted adults.

& then for some reason people fixate more on "ugh these teenagers just want to be treated like babies!!! teenagers are to blame for the rise in puritanism!!!!!" than how this is a very obvious example of ageism and the increased control over a socially vulnerable and exploited group

I think a commonly overlooked part of this coddling is that it teaches kids and teenagers to be afraid of things they don't need to be afraid of, which is exactly how they end up as "puriteens". I remember as a child being terrified to change the channel on the tv because I had ended up with the impression that seeing even seconds of an R rated movie or tv show would give me nightmares. And then as a tween every time I saw swearing I felt sick to my stomach because I had been taught such a thing is bad and harmful. I think I would have suffered less if I hadn't been raised with everyone around me acting like mature media was so bad. By the time I was a teenager I had figured out this was bunk, but understandably a lot of people don't. By making this whole system worse and stronger you have teens who have been told that seeing explicit or dark media Will Harm Them, and so they act in ways that would be appropriate if it really was the info-hazard it's implied to be.

^^ never heard anybody specifically talk about this but yeah. parents acting like sexual or any "dark" content in a story or show was going to put bad things in my head that were going to be there permanently just gave me a deeply distressing sort of contamination anxiety

when my mental disability disables me mentally

Actually what is the expected lifespan of a stone wall? I grew up in New England

I don’t know. They could last indefinitely in perfect conditions on flat land. Like I said, they’re at the bottom of a mountain in Appalachia and this wall has held back 60 years of snow melt and ground shifting and it has survived countless major weather events. In my opinion it is very good work and I think 60 is a good run for a rock retaining wall. The problem is that grandpa feels like the wall was put up recently so he thinks it is shitty craftsmanship. He’s mad because he can’t quite grasp that this wall has done its job for 60 years. Dementia is a terrible disease but if you don’t laugh you’ll cry and grandpa’s righteous indignation at this man’s work is kinda hilarious.

We've had gacha RPGs about libraries and pharmaceutical companies as paramilitary organisations – I feel like the next obvious unexplored frontier is public transit. The player takes on the role of a route planning director for a puzzlingly well armed quasi-governmental transit agency. All of your agents have bus driver aesthetic.

You'd think providing free public transit would be a no brainer in terms of maintaining good relations with existing nation-states, but in practice a lot of them hate you because you provide bus service to places people aren't supposed to be able to leave. There's a whole quest line about keeping Route 666 to Hell up and running.

That route must cost a lot in road maintenance since you have to repave it using good intentions instead of asphalt.

You're working for an organisation that's willing to fight demons to keep a bus route open. Good intentions are not in short supply!

Thank you divorce for all you've done for music

that Brian Eno quote about how whatever you find most repulsive about a medium (film grain, record scratches/fuzz, CDs skipping) will be the first thing you try and emulate once that medium is obsolete because it's "the sign of a moment too powerful for the medium assigned to contain it".... man.......

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” -Brian Eno