We clench our butts as a reflex to fear so that no one can fuck us in the ass.

That is NOT why

Fun fact: if you, as an adult, tell miserable children that their youth is the best that life will ever be, and that it's all just downhill from there, there's a percentage of them who will hear this and think "well, I guess I better kill myself before that happens." And a certain percentage of those will proceed to do that and succeed.

Anyway what I'm saying is that any time you feel tempted to say that, you should instead consider shutting the fuck up. Just because you peaked at 16 doesn't mean anyone else did. Most peoples' lives get better than that.

“wait til you’re my age” well you’re making it less likely that i will

I feel like I'm the last person alive writing in Word, but wanted to share this because it might save someone some heartache.

I am used to Word autosaving relentlessly; for the last few years it didn't really even have a "File>Save" command that I could see--it just autosaved like every five seconds or something. It took me a long time to get used not clicking File>Save at the end of every writing session, and I never really trusted it--with good reason, it turns out.

Apparently, when you turn off Word's new ai features, AutoSave is disabled and cannot be turned back on. There is toggle button in the upper left for it, but when I try to toggle it on, it says "Autosave is not available because of your privacy settings." I worked in my document yesterday, put my computer to sleep with the doc still open on the taskbar (my usual habit), and when I opened it today, the new work I did yesterday was gone.

This time I only lost about 300 words, which I had typed into my document from my longhand-writing in a notebook (so I guess I kind of autosaved them that way!), but if I'd really been on a roll, this could have been a disaster.

Be careful out there. Everything is terrible!

Yeah, they're baking it into essential compontents now so we'll stop turning it off. Noticed that in several programs. FFS I hate all of these tech bros.

"Republicans don't have consistent morals"

Yes they do. It's just that their morals are rooted in "protect the people and things closest to me at all costs". Their values are extreme tribalism. They also believe those outside the group are constantly threatening the safety and prosperity of the in-group.

This is why so much of what they do seems contradictory and hypocritical. Yes, they want prosperity for those they consider "like them", but they are also willing to do things that harm themselves if it harms the "enemy" more. And, they blame the enemy for that harm, not themselves.

It's literally "this is why we can't have nice things". It's your fault.

A conservative may think, "welfare might be nice, and it's true all my neighbors depend on it, but those welfare queens are stealing it, so we can't have it. Public pools might be nice, and they provide a safe place for my children to play, but people I consider unclean might use them, so we can't have them."

This is how a conservative woman can justify an abortion for herself, but not for others, even though anti-abortion laws make it harder for her to get that abortion in the first place.

What needs to be done will morph and change, external influences will change what they think are important values for the inside group to have to some degree, but at the core it's always about protecting their own.

Who would win?

had a fascinating english class that resulted in the notes header “the forcefeminization of victor frankenstein”

what the people want, the people get

you see

my professor’s take is that mary shelley is feminizing victor throughout the novel, as a way of flipping gender roles and putting a male character through female experiences.

evidence as explained:

Also, Shelley’s mother died in childbirth. It’s interesting, then, that Shelley presents the creation of life as something horrific and damaging. She parallels Victor with her mother.

in conclusion, Frankenstein (1818) by Mary  Wollstonecraft Shelley is one of the first examples of mpreg in English literature 

if victor is her mother, then it follows that she may also have been writing a little self insert of herself as the monster.

People love to say things like “Hiding Anne Frank was illegal, turning her in would have been legal” without like fully grasping the modern implications properly. You have tons of folks like “if WW2 happened today id have __” that do not realize what is happening around them.

We have this idolized AND sanitized version of what happened then, and so we do not recognize it when it happens now.

Resistance fighters assassinated nazis and blew up weapons and infrastructure and destroyed records and forged paperwork and raised secret funds and smuggled people in vehicles and yes, hid them in their homes.

“Well it’s sad he got sent to an ICE camp but he faked his permit :/“

Whoever helped him fake his paperwork did what fighters in ww2 did. People who cut through chain link fences do what fighters in ww2 did, people who blow whistles chasing after ice cars do what fighters in ww2 did, people who destroy arms factories and cop city cranes do what fighters in ww2 did, people unmask agents do what fighters in ww2 did.

People are doing it now! They’ve been doing it now! You keep saying “oh if this happened here__” it HAS! It IS!

What are you doing about it?

Sometimes you send something you found online to a friend because you want to brighten their day, and sometimes you send something you found online to a friend with the precise attitude and bearing of a cat very carefully lining up their paw with the back of another cat's head.

Another thing about light pollution and adjacent things is. They threatened my area with rolling blackouts last winter. Now this was of course largely because the AI datacenters are hogging all the electricity, but in the notifications about it they always specified that that residential areas would be the blacked out areas. Not offices. Not businesses. If you're at home and freezing, well, you can just go loiter in a McDonald's I guess. Never mind that this is extremely difficult for disabled people and often not allowed for pets.

Well, as winter turned into spring, I started biking home from work. A long, circuitous route that took me through residential areas, and past offices and businesses. Offices and businesses that were closed for the day. And yet their signs were still lit up. The lights were still on inside. There were TVs playing in empty breakrooms. All the computers in the school district offices stayed on, their monitors not even going to sleep, all night. Paused to take a break in an empty strip mall once and when I leaned against the glass of a restaurant I could hear the music still playing inside.

Like. There's something deeply rotten about the priorities here. These places that are so flagrantly wasting electricity will never be subject to the rolling blackouts that could freeze you out of your home. Not even at night, when no one is there, when they don't need their lights on. Their waste is prioritized over normal people's life.

Warding off the oncoming depressive episode by reading about very old tortoises

Pleased to report that the 190 year old tortoise is a gay icon

Jonathan is the oldest known land animal btw. I need everyone to know that the oldest animal alive on land is a gay tortoise

When I was at my doctor's office yesterday they were playing an easy listening cover of "Africa" by Toto in the waiting room. If you had asked me prior to this experience, I would have confidently asserted that an easy listening cover of "Africa" by Toto would be redundant, but evidently I did not properly appreciate just how easy the listening could get.

Share this, please. Do not be fooled by ICE’s administrative warrants. They are NOT a legal basis for a search or to enter your home or business. For that, ICE must present a JUDICIAL WARRANT.

The difference is shown below. Study it.

A lot of public media will be destroyed by this. Public TV and radio are vital for rural areas in our country, and without them, anyone living there will have a difficult time finding out about important news in their area.

One thing you can do is find your local PBS station and click “donate” at the top of the page. https://www.pbs.org/stations/