"Friends outside of Minnesota please read. I'm sharing a post written by a personal friend and medical doctor: Friends outside MN, you need to know what is happening here. Everyone knows that ICE shot and killed a woman here on Wednesday. But that’s not the only thing that’s going on:
- ICE agents are cruising areas with immigrant-owned businesses, and kidnapping patrons and employees alike. Yesterday they abducted two US citizen employees at a suburban Target, one who was begging them to allow him to go get his passport to show them.
- ICE is going door to door in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, asking residents where their immigrant neighbors live. Read that again. If it sounds like something out of your high school history textbook, that’s because it is.
- ICE is targeting schools and school buses. They pepper sprayed teenagers and abducted two school staff members at the high school up the street from me on Wednesday. Police are literally escorting school buses to ensure children can get to school and home safely. The Minneapolis Public Schools have moved to virtual learning for the next 4 weeks because it’s unsafe for children or teachers to physically come to school.
- They are targeting hospitals and clinics. Patients are scared and are cancelling their appointments or just not showing up. Kids are missing their checkups and vaccines, folks aren’t getting their cancer care, etc.
- They are smashing windows in cars and homes.
- ICE is increasingly picking up Native Americans—again, targeting folks based on skin color alone.
- They are arresting and beating legal observers. A friend of a friend had her arm broken yesterday. Folks are showing up at local hospitals, brought in in ICE custody, with severe injuries that are absolutely inconsistent with mechanism of injury reported by ICE. (Think: patient appears to have been beaten unconscious, while ICE agent says he slipped and fell.) I can’t emphasize enough that these ICE agents do not have warrants. There are 2,000+ agents here and they are simply hunting for anyone that’s not white. It doesn’t matter if you’re a citizen or a green card holder, they will kidnap you first and ask questions later. But the community is fighting back.
- Protests are happening every day.
- Community groups have been leading know-your-rights sessions for months, often to packed venues.
- Whistles are being distributed by the thousands, carried on keychains and worn on coat zippers, always at the ready to be blown in warning if ICE is spotted.
- Drivers are following ICE vehicles, blaring their horns in warning.
- Businesses are locking their doors even while open to keep employees and customers safe. As I type this, I’m standing guard at the locked door of our neighborhood burrito joint while I wait for my takeout order, so the employees can focus on their jobs. The place is packed with neighbors supporting this small business.
- Anti-ICE signs are posted everywhere. The community is making it crystal clear that ICE is not welcome here.
- Parents and neighbors are standing guard outside schools, organizing carpools, and escorting kids to and from school on foot.
- Parents of kids in Spanish-immersion daycare (there are a LOT of these daycares here!) are keeping their kids home so the teachers don’t have to take the risk of coming to work.
- Churches and community groups are holding fundraisers to buy and deliver groceries to families who don’t feel safe leaving home.
- Mutual aid money is going out to folks who can’t make rent because they can’t work or because a breadwinner was abducted, or who need a warm place to stay after their home’s windows were smashed. THAT is what is happening here. This fight is ongoing and it’s horrifying to watch. But we are not backing down. To my friends in other cities and states, don’t think for a minute that this won’t happen in your town. It will. Be ready. Learn from us, as we have learned from Portland and Chicago and New York. Fight back. Don’t let us get to the last line of Martin Niemoller’s poem.” -Grant Boulanger
Here's an AP news brief with a little more info. It's limited in the way major news outlets are right now but provides context that supports the personal account shared.
[image description: an excerpt of text that says:
“It’s funny,” I told Flewin. “We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and Tetris is the only game we own. My wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She’s weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem.”
What Flewin said next I will never forget.
“Oh, my!”
/end id]
TL;DR on the article
The husband was writing an article on classic video game records, was surprised to find out that holding the Tetris record is a bit of a big deal, and mentions how good his wife is at it.
The guy he’s talking to mentions that the record is 327, way lower than his wifes usual scores of 500-600.
They travel to a tournament, and she goes to do her attempt. Just after she beats 327, and is climbing higher, a judge brings up to the husband that the specific version she’s playing actually has a different record of 545.
She overhears that she needs to beat 500-something, and keeps going, setting the record at 841.
which, they later find out, is her second-best record
There was a decent but ultimately forgettable fantasy novel I read a long time ago that had a single moment that stuck with me.
The protagonist has just won the world famous sword fighting competition in the big, rich capital and is talking to his mentor, and says something about being the best swordsman in the world. The mentor frowns and tells him that no, he isn't. He is the best swordsman out of the people that could afford to show up to this tournament. There could be a mercenary way out in the mountains, patrolling a snow encrusted fort's walls that could kick his ass and there was no way to know until he was already losing to the guy.
I think about that a lot, and how for every apparently dominant competitor, there might be a fucking ronin out there somewhere capable of destroying them.
Always reblog tetris ronin lady
my luminous mama
i was so moved by this picture i had to draw it
is it a hot take to say that i think you need to understand why something is bad, not just that it simply is?
this is a part of the problem
you need to be able to explain why you shouldnt use ai rather than “oh well its obviously bad and you shouldnt use it or else youre a bad person” because that isn’t logic. “ai generates child porn based off of real children and whether or not it does is entirely up to how it is built and if pedophiles are able to find ways around those safeguards, because ai cannot in itself discern right from wrong” is a genuine criticism. “amazon tried to build a data center the size of tuson outside of tuson just to power their ai that would’ve increased the inability to stay alive outside in parts of arizona” is a genuine criticism. even “using generative ai teaches you not to learn how to do things yourself even when they’re difficult, devaluing necessary skills out of practice” is a genuine criticism when you look at the amount of people who think they are able of doing a difficult major when they couldnt write their own papers in high school.
but “ai is just bad because it’s bad” will convince no one and is a morally lazy position to take. about anything!
you need to know why reading someone’s diary is wrong if you want to learn about privacy and respect. you need to know why child sexual assault is wrong if you want to be able to help children form healthy age appropriate relationships. you need to know why capitalism is bad if you want to replace it with something else. you need actual concrete ideas and ideologies rather than “you should agree with me because i have the right vibe”
does anybody even have a 9-5 anymore. at some point they started making you work 8 hours not including your lunch break so it's all 9-5:30s and 9-6s and we should have killed them for it
In my first year university course there was a class I remember as being mandatory (at least for English majors) about fallacies and biases in writing. And this prof was all about reading the whole article before you formed your argument. That was his whole thing. You know measure twice cut once he was read twice respond once. He stressed this so much that on our final exam (which was two long form essay questions and a few short answer questions) that I decided to read the WHOLE exam booklet before I grabbed my pen.
Turns out that is what he wanted. The final page, the final question, informed the student that if they wrote 1. Their name, 2. Their student number 3. Their favourite fallacy, and wait for 30 minutes so they don't arouse suspicion, you will literally be given 100 percent for the exam WORTH 40 PERCENT OF YOUR GRADE.
I think about it to this day. The prof literally saw the "reading comprehension on this site is piss poor" and said I can fix them
I made this, please feel free to use
I made this post a couple months ago, and I completely forgot that I made it
today has been one of the worst days of my entire life, and this post somehow made its way back to me, like a mental-health chef boyardee can.
it actually helped me a lot
have some more
that's a cat ✅️
tears before bedtime
stupid stolen video from twitter has me in tears it’s so dumb but at the same time
Breaking: Miles Edgeworth will be a guest on the new season of Um, Actually. He's gonna nail all the Steel Samurai questions.
my corner store guy is a 50 year old man who's my best friend in the world and recently he was like "you're too pretty to be single I have some nephews you should meet. very handsome!" and I was like "a niece might be more up my alley" and he just got more excited and said "ah even better! I was overselling my nephews but my nieces are very beautiful"
OP the tags!!
people saying “don’t use your full government name for your ao3”, “create different emails for work and personal use” but personally I think it’s both sad and dystopian how capitalism/companies/even schools think they have the rights to cross your personal boundaries and insert themselves into your personal life. like, I get it, safety wise, why checking digital footprints can be important sometimes. but a gay fanfiction is not a fucking threat that could ever cause anybody harm. it’s funny (not really, it’s still sad and dystopian) how they now think they can control your personal life and prevent you from having hobbies
polytrix for my wife