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.
Congress is now considering the appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security, whose funding runs out at the end of January.
Call your members of Congress and tell them to vote NO on any bill that increases ICE’s funding.
Please demand that the DHS appropriations bill prohibit ICE and Border Patrol agents from carrying guns and that it unambiguously declare that agents do not have absolute immunity under the law if they harm civilians.
Also tell them that any bill must restrict ICE and Border Patrol’s ability to conduct dragnet arrest operations and target people based on their race, language or accent. And the bill must clarify that ICE agents are liable under civil and criminal law if they harm civilians.
Do this as soon as you can.
To reach your representative or senator, call the U.S. Congressional Switchboard at (202) 224-3121.
Tell them the state and city where you live. They will connect you to any member’s office.
I’m not seeing a lot of posts with links to Minnesota Mutual Aid Funds so here’s a post
Extra info was provided by a local friend I wont name because shit is scary for our Minnesota friends. But here’s some valuable orgs and funds that are on the ground helping right now
Powderhorn Families - direct donation to families in the Powderhorn Park neighborhood so their rent and utilities are paid while they are sheltering in place during ICE deployments
Fe y Justicia - Latine aid organization that is managing rapid response in St Cloud
Toy from Ancient Greece, c.450 BCE: this doll was crafted in the form of a woman with a rolling pin, and it has articulated joints that allow the rolling pin to be moved back and forth
This terracotta figurine was created nearly 2,500 years ago, and it was likely designed as a toy. The doll is positioned above a small tray, and its torso is equipped with a set of pins (located in the waist and shoulders) that allow the figure to lean up and down, gently pushing the rolling pin back and forth across the tray as if preparing food.
Above: another view of the same doll
This is not the only known example of an articulated doll from ancient Greece. Many so-called “dancing dolls” (also known as plangones) were created throughout the Greco-Roman world.
Above: bone figurine with articulated limbs, from ancient Greece, c.350-250 BCE
Female dolls with attached limbs known as plangones, korai, or nymphai were made in numerous areas in Greece over a considerable span of time from the Geometric to the Hellenistic periods. Male dolls also exist but were far less popular. Although made out of a wide range of materials, including wood, bone, ivory, marble, wax, cloth, and alabaster, dolls of terracotta are by far the most common.
The same book goes on to describe some of the other toys that were created and used by the ancient Greeks:
In antiquity, play was as much an integral part of growing up as it is today, and the ancient Greeks possessed a wide variety of toys and games. Both the archaeological record and ancient literature provide information about these, only some of which overlaps. The most common toys preserved include rattles, dolls, knucklebones, figurines, miniature vessels, miniature furniture, and miniature animals, some of which are wheeled and some of which have riders. Less common are balls and wheeled carts.
Ancient toys have been unearthed in many other parts of the world, too.
Above: a wheeled horse from Roman Egypt, c.50-250 CE
Some of the rattles, pull-toys, articulated dolls, and mechanical figurines from Mesopotamia and Egypt even date back to nearly 4,000 years ago.
Above: a mechanical dog figurine from Egypt, c.1390-1352 BCE, with a lever that opens and closes the dog’s mouth
reminder to worldbuilders: don’t get caught up in things that aren’t important to the story you’re writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics
@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this
I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset
What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know
Mordor.
Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.
And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!
So what is a rain shadow?
Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can’t get past ‘em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can’t get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.
Oh yeah nothing is more annoying than fantasy maps that can’t get mountains, rivers and rain shadows right.
May I recommend my new favorite tool: Mapgen4. You start with a random seed and then add mountains, valleys, shallow water, or oceans as you like. You can adjust the wind direction to make wind shadows off the mountains fall where you want. You can adjust overall raininess to make the rivers larger or smaller, or have more or fewer tributaries. It works best for small, isolated landmasses (think islands more than continents) but as there’s no scale bar and it’s all slightly abstracted anyway you can do whatever you want with it. I’ve only just started playing with it but it’s SO FUN.
I do think this could be useful for writers! …Caveat, if you’re going to use this for making a map for anything published (digital or paper, even if it’s only in a fanfic archive or whatever), please, please credit the creator and their program as how you made that map! The more ways information like this gets out there, the more useful it’ll be to other writers, roleplaying game DMs/GMs, creators, etc.
One of my favourites for mapping plates, biomes, etc is Tectonics.js. If you’re familiar with how tectonics shape a planet, you can guess where the features go by toggling plates, crust thickness, etc. Between Mapgen4 and Tectonics.js, we’ve got some pretty sweet tools at our disposal.
Also I would recommend looking into Landscape Archaeology as well! That’s because Landscape archeology is basically adding the social/cultural layer on top of all that geology and geography. Environments change when communities live in them, and communities likewise adapt to various environments.
This is a short free introduction to the concept: “Notes on Landscape Archaeology.” To summarize, Landscape archaeology sort of like…studies the relation of people to places/spaces (that is, landscapes) in time.
Also this paper [An Archeology of Landscapes] breaks down/introduces the key concepts that I learned which is first that you can form the “construct paradigm” of a landscape from settlement ecology,
ritual landscapes, and ethnic landscapes.
And then the highlights of their summary of what constitutes defining a landscape:
Landscapes are not synonymous with natural environments. Landscapes
are synthetic (Jackson, 1984, p. 156), with cultural systems structuring and
organizing peoples’ interactions with their natural environments …
Landscapes are worlds of cultural product … Through their daily activities, beliefs, and values, communities transform
physical spaces into meaningful places. …
Landscapes are the arena for all of a community’s activities. Thus landscapes not only are constructs of human populations but they also are the
milieu in which those populations survive and sustain themselves. A landscape’s domain involves patterning in both within-place and between-place
contexts …
Landscapes are dynamic constructions, with each community and each
generation imposing its own cognitive map on an anthropogenic world of interconnected morphology, arrangement, and coherent meaning …
Basically a “landscape” is made by a community living in an environment. Once you have a geological environment that makes sense, landscape archaeology is like… Basically how I feel confident knowing where trade routes would be on a map, where there are areas of continual high conflict, what kinds of agriculture exists where, etc. once the geological stuff is hammered out, it’s like…I know how that would influence the local cultures and vice versa. At that point, it’s easy to start marking the natural borders, settlements, trade/port cities, and even strategic fortresses. If you have properly put rivers on a map, then marking your port cities is effortless, basically.
Also:
This course syllabus for a Landscape Archaeology class is freely accessible. It includes an online resources page.
(Landscape Biographies is open access, as is Landscape Archaeology between Art and Science: From a Multi- to an Interdisciplinary Approach. But I wouldn’t try to read every essay.)
If you are like me and find it helpful to have video reference for a process/activity in addition to a written guide, Artifexian is a YouTube channel that does a LOT of world building stuff and specifically he’s in the process of creating a world following a lot of Worldbuilding Pasta’s methodology!
I need everyone to know that I looked it up, and Noah Lyles is doing this as part of an ongoing bet he has with shotput competitor Chase Jackson. She’s wearing Naruto accessories every day, and if Lyles whips out Yugioh cards at every race, then for the shotput finals Jackson will re-enact the scene of Rock Lee dropping his weights.
This is now the only part of the Olympics that I care about.
Update. Chase Jackson followed through. (And also secured her spot to the Olympics with a first place throw of 20.10 m).
so many creatures putting SO much effort into putting ‘special’ fluids that TOTALLY aren’t water through every organ possible to clean them so they can use them again 2 seconds later. like why not simply sit on a damp substrate and pull water through your body by evaporating the extra out pores in your leaves lmaoooo
‘nooo nooo you don’t get it I need the big organ to run the fast firing nerves to run the machines that make the fluid go to work the big organ’. whatever chordate. lol
troubleshooting time: arid area, low on damp substrate. what do?
good question! you could try closing your leaf pores for a while until more appears… sometimes you can also put more tubes down and feel around until you find some. water comes from the opposite direction of the sun unless it doesn’t ❤️ glad I could help!!
omg useless advice from privileged mfs from wet climates as usual… bet you don’t even use CAM.
ok first of all i checked your profile and of COURSE its all meadows, say youre a grass who does C4 without saying youre a grass who does C4 100% speedrun challenge. sorry i wasnt blessed with a whole separate sheath of cells for increasing photosynthetic efficiency and nothing else but some of us actually have to adapt and deal with the VERY REAL AND SEVERE effects of photorespiration… literally imagine having 30 foot deep roots posting this. second of all ‘plants in wet climates are privileged’ you can literally live in water and use CAM??? isoetes erasure per usual on this website, neglected by an angiosperm monocot no less. why am i not surprised
That’s too many types of blade to be good at throwing
average karlach gameplay
So, I usually try to find/check sources for Really Cool videos (and photos) these days, what with AI being what it is (not that I don’t trust a random spam video posting account with no tags or sources on any videos, but… well, I don’t, actually), and I’m pleased to announce that this video is from a world champion knife thrower, Soulthrower!
And if you like this compilation, the guy actually has a shitton more videos on his various media accounts, including vids with advice/instruction on learning to throw knives etc, yourself. He also mentions on every single page that he is a stroke survivor, so I feel that’s important to mention here, too.
bigotry against left-handed people is inherently the least funny form of oppression because it makes right-handed people go lol isn’t it stupid that we used discriminate against people based on something so ridiculous? as if skin colour, culture, weight, disability, religion etc are somehow sensible and logical things to discriminate against. then i go outside and make a fool of myself because all the tools are right-handed and no one thought to provide me with tools i can use.
Story time: being left-handed is not that rare, yet still I seem to end up in places where I’m the only left-handed person for miles. So, in my former working place, I had my desk optimised to me being left-handed. My computer mouse was on the left side, keys switched. Now, whenever someone wanted to show me something on MY computer, they complained about the mouse. Even when I said “Well, that’s how I feel if I have to work on your computer, have you heard me complaining?” it didn’t really get through. One older man, upon seeing me write with my left hand, straight out said “left handed? That’s not ok!”
My parents are both left-handed. My mother was forced to write with her right hand, losing all her creativity in the process. They didn’t succeed with my father, though.
Something I learned from a butcher: knives are sharpened in a way that makes it easier for right-handed people to cut straight. If you are left-handed, your knives are working actively against you. He had his own personal set of knives no one was allowed to touch, and were sharpened the other way around.
Buying a computer mouse for gaming is hell if you’re left-handed. Even the ones advertised as “ambidextrous” usually have thumb keys on the side you have to operate with your pinkie. Real left-handed mice are way more expensive.
Mobiles, websites and apps are designed to be easy to use with your right hand, while you can’t see shit if you use your left.
Even my kettle is designed for right-handed people. If I want to see the temperature, I can’t pour with my left hand. Most cups have print on them on one side, or the more beautiful picture on the side you see when holding your cup in the right hand.
A lot of cooking utensils are designed to use with the right hand.
I love fountain pens, but finding the right one and the right kind of ink (fast drying) is a pain in the rear. Ballpoint pens usually scratch and don’t work so well for me.
So, I know these seem like relatively small issues, but they’re everywhere. There’s not a single day where I’m not reminded of being left-handed, either by some appliance I have to find a way to use or by a person remarking on that.
Bottom line: we may allow children and adults to be left-handed, but we’re not making it any easier for them in everyday life. It’s basically more like “yeah, you can do that, but you will be slower, less skilled, have to spend more money on appliances that work for you, and people are still gonna remark on that”.
Black asexual singer Jourdain Pauline was sexually assaulted by the streamer Tylil and she’s facing mass online abuse saying she can’t be sexually assaulted because she is asexual.
What happened to Jourdin Pauline is what every Black asexual person’s been saying since day & a horrifying viral example of what we’ve been going through for years. Antiblackness & compulsory sexuality have always been linked. It’s time to wake the fuck up, ace or not.
The core of ace discourse was/is about reinforcing compulsory sexuality not education. ‘Not understanding’ asexuality, good or bad faith, is used to justify its erasure. It’s a classic conservative idea that what doesn’t instantly make sense has no right to exist.
The reactionary idea that human sexuality that isn’t cisheterosexuality shouldn’t exist is tied to anti-victim/survivor rhetoric. When an asexual person is sexually assaulted, the viewer focuses on their 'confusing’ nature as the problem instead of the violation + violator.
The idea that Jourdain Pauline deserved to be assaulted for not being cisheterosexual is a chilling but common anti-queer rape culture talking point. Her SA is being justified because she’s asexual.
Jourdin Pauline isn’t the first Black asexual woman to be sexualised and sexually humiliated due to conservatism. The eroticisation of Yasmin Benoit and Matt Walsh’s harassment of Latoya Raveneau come to mind. Most Black ace women know this sexualisation too well.
Most if not all women under patriarchy have faced some form of sexual violence. But because asexuality specifically is seen as going against human nature, it’s believed that it needs to be corrected with forced sex/sexual acts. And this belief is commonly shared, even with 'progressives’
What else is left to say really? When you centre whiteness in queerness & support rape culture out of spite for queers you hate, you create the perfect condition for antiblack sexual violence like these to thrive. No one listened to us. The Black asexual is always collateral damage.
The Black asexual is always collateral damage, of white allosexual queers who erase us under the guise of 'progressive’ acephobia, white asexuals who engage in puritanism for their own benefit & Black cishet people who believe their sexuality will give them approval from white society.
With the rebrand of fascism, more and more asexual people especially women are gonna come out with being (correctively) SA’d & only very few leftist leaning people will do anything about the rape culture in front of our fucking eyes. It’s disgusting.
And I absolutely expect the white asexual/aspec community will ignore Jourdain Pauline’s assault & sexualisation like they ignored Latoya Raveneau & Yasmin Benoit. Or give out shallow 'support POC’ posts like usual. We’re only sexual perpetrators to them, never victims.
Note: It’s still FUCK this hellsite and it’s rasclart users and I’m still never giving you lot my hard work again, but if you learn anything from this post, it’s that antiblackness and rape culture, the ones you enable on here and beyond, the one I’ve been warning you all about, the one I got harassed on here by white queer people and non Black queers of colour across the entire gender and sexuality spectrum for, exists in the real world and the consequences are deadly. If you feel bad reading this, you should.
Don’t post online about what protests you plan to attend.
Be safe. Be smart. Don’t fall for the weird pressure to liveblog political actions when we live in a surveillance state.
And for fuck’s sake, stop posting unredacted pictures of people at protests. It’s not a fucking party. It’s a political action and you could get someone killed. I have a personal friend who was doxxed and harassed for MONTHS in 2020 after their photo at a protest got passed around by neonazis. Do not be a part of that happening to someone.
