Two Face #6 (2025) / The New Titans: A Lonely Place of Dying #2 (1989) / Batman: Dark Victory #2 (1999) / The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us! - Sufjan Stevens / Embrace - Paul Wever / i don’t wanna be without ya - transbrucewayne / The Fall - Alan Stephens Foster / The Judas Coin (2012) / The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller
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.
It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn’t look scared. She didn’t look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, “I thought you guys were coming.”
#i didnt reblog the first time #because i wanted to verify this #and now that i have? hell yeah brownie grandma
Can you please share how you verified, and give alternate sources, so we can maybe quiet the accusations of “A.I. slop” in the comments?
I’d be only too happy to do that. I was suspicious to start, too. It seemed a bit on the nose to have the weed brownie grandma named “Mary Jane,” but also, that’s a very common combination in a certain place and time, so I thought it was worth the extra effort.
What I did was find sources that made the claim (in this case, that a woman named Mary Jane was a medicinal marijuana activist in California, USA in the 1980s and 90s.) I checked the dates to get some certainty those sources aren’t AI slop, then checked that the sources are generally reliable.
Then I followed useful details about the place and time, and other people involved, to explore it more fully.
The first thing I did was search for “Brownie Mary” and see if that turned anything up at all. It turned up a LOT of results. Predictably, some of them were recipes, but not all of them.
ALT
Next up, I checked sources and dates. Wikipedia can be dodgy for academic use, but their policy on LLM-generated input is very clear: they don’t want slop. I started by reading that page and then went on to read others.
The Atlas Obscura article is from 2018. I found another one from SFWeekly from 2017.
Both of those are decent sources - Atlas Obscura gets a High factual reporting rate from MediaBiasFactCheck, and while MBFC doesn’t have a rating for SFWeekly, the verbiage in that article is very close to what GastroObscura has. (Also to what the post itself has, right down to the choice of pull quote.)
Now, we can stop there and feel pretty confident that articles published before the wide availability of LLMs are not, in fact, LLM generated.
…or we can go deeper, and run this all the way back to source.
I spotted references to a Chicago Tribune imterview of Mary Jane Rathbun, published in 1993.
My search string of “Chicago Tribune 1993 Mary Jane Rathbun” hit it in the top 3 results. That article includes some fun new details: she wore a cannabis leaf shaped pendant to her trial!
She also objected to being portrayed as a cuddly grandma up against The Man, so I must retract my flippant tags, above.
The evidence now strongly points to Brownie Mary being a real woman who really went to court for giving AIDS patients weed brownies. But can we get closer? I’ve now seen several mentions of a 1980 attempt at convicting her too.
The articles have mentioned Sonoma County and a nonprofit called the Shanti Project, so let’s hook onto that and see what we get.
Searching for “Mary Jane Rathbun Sonoma County 1980” gets me an article from a law firm; that mentions the prosecuting attorney by name, and points to a book: Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra, by Paulette Frankl. It even has an excerpt!
We can run the book down too, just for fun (now we have a primary source.) My favorite used book site has a copy for $1. Amazon gives a view of the back cover, too:
…wow. I should see if my library has that!
The excerpt on the site has a mention of a candelight vigil held for her death in 1999. It took some hunting past things I’d already read and a bunch of shops giving written tributes, but I found a news report about that, too.
There’s a lot of information out there, and it’s worth digging into. Otherwise it’s altogether too easy to think something real and worth knowing is just another bit of slop.
Thank you.
Signal boosting for the Truth.
As I said in the tags previous to this, A.I. is damaging to our culture not only for producing slop, but also for spreading mistrust of the truth.
Reblogging not just for the awesome history lesson but also the beautiful display of step-by-step fact checking and source researching in this age of AI slop
SHABBOS IS COMING! WE’RE SO HAPPY! WE’RE GONNA SING AND SHOUT OUT LOUD. SIX DAYS A WEEK WE WAIT FOR SHABBOS A GIFT FROM HASHEM AND WE’RE SO PROUD. SING IT TOGETHER: SHABBOS.
One time my grandfather picked me up from the airport and was driving me home and asked if I wanted to stop at McDonald’s. And I was like sure, we can stop at the one in [town].
And he was like “we don’t need to go to [town], we’ll just go to the one in your town. And I said my town doesn’t have a McDonald’s. And he was like "okay, we’ll go to the closest one”. And I was like right, the one in [town]. And he said “that’s twenty minutes away from your house, you really don’t have one closer?” And when I confirmed that he said “well, it doesn’t have to be McDonald’s. It can be whatever fast food place is in your town.” And I was like there is no fast food in my town. There is no food in my town period unless you want to stop for gas station hot dogs. And he was like “that doesn’t make any sense. Then what do you do when you need food?” And I said I drive to [town]. And he said “every single time you need food or groceries?” And I said yeah, that’s sort of how the fixed nature of buildings work. And then we drove in silence for ten minutes while this man tried to wrap his head around the fact that I had to drive twenty minutes to town to go grocery shopping.
Anyway a lot of you remind me of this experience pretty much every time the urban/rural divide comes up on this website.
I’m really enjoying that this is picking up notes because most of them are people like “oh yeah, 20 minutes isn’t even that bad, I have to drive an hour to my [town]” and then there’s a handful of people freaking out like “oh my god, are Americans okay??? Shouldn’t your government be doing something about this????”
Idk what the government is gonna do about it man, I think me and my 6 neighbors within walking distance are just gonna have to keep driving to [town]
My home town (pop. 1000ish) was a half our drive to anything of note. And as someone who can’t drive, I had to ride my bike over an hour everyday before and after my first W-2 job unless someone took there truck to work and would give me a lift.
If you see the quote “I refuse to share my body with a man who wouldn’t defend it politically” or any variation of it floating around the internet — it was Kat Blaque who originally said it and she would really appreciate it if people gave her proper credit for it but it’s gone viral on a lot of different platforms and most of the people sharing it don’t know it’s from her or choose not to credit her on purpose.
Like I just know terfs are going to be parroting it pretending it wasn’t said by a black trans woman about herself & her life.
Every time I’m forced by circumstance to hand-sew something, I remember a fairytale I once read. There are lead-up shenanigans as the humble protagonist helps small animals and meets the princess and all that, but in the climax, the princess rigs a contest for her hand by setting her own task: sew her a dress in a single night.
The noble suitors, who have never sewn a thing in their lives, sabotage themselves by their own ambitions: they choose difficult fabrics to work with and cut huge, elaborate patterns and select gems and pearls and beads to sew onto it, and snip such long bits of thread that they lose time detangling their stitches, and ultimately resort to pinning bits together as they run out of time, so that their offerings initially look beautiful and flashy, but when the princess tries them on they stick her with pin ends and fall apart as she moves.
The humble protagonist uses a very simple pattern without embellishments and sews using short lengths of thread (snipped off and threaded for him by little birds of course) which don’t tangle and therefore save time. His dress is plain by contrast, but holds together and the princess is able to move freely in it, and so he wins the contest and her hand.
I particularly think about the bit about threading the needle with shorter lengths of thread, needing to tie off more often but avoiding tangles and thereby saving time.
I then ignore that piece of wisdom passed down through who knows how many years and proceed to cut the longest damn length of thread I can manage because I hate tying off beginning or ending knots and I will not subject myself to more of that even if it does mean more tangles along the way.
My “It can’t be that bad- no one from the 29th century showed up to undo what I did.” t-shirt is raising a lot of questions from Temporal Investigations that my t-shirt should have explained.
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