Narcissus taking a selfie is the ACTUAL best.
These are REALLY cool
These are art in themselves, in a some of them point out what lockdown was like for us, they’re expressed themselves in a really cool way. But I think these are going to be talked about in the future.
@elodieunderglass I see that you are in this series
No series would be complete without!
Hate it when TikTok farm cosplayers and cottagecore types say stuff like "I'm not going to use modern equipment because my grandmothers could make do without it." Ma'am, your great grandma had eleven children. She would have killed for a slow cooker and a stick blender.
I’ve noticed a sort of implicit belief that people used to do things the hard way in the past because they were tougher or something. In reality, labor-saving devices have historically been adopted by the populace as soon as they were economically feasible. No one stood in front of a smoky fire or a boiling pot of lye soap for hours because they were virtuous, they did it because it was the only way to survive.
Taking these screenshots from Facebook because they make you log in and won't let you copy and paste:
You don’t say.
For the record, she actually abandoned the movement BEFORE they all got whooping cough, but abandoned it too late. There’d been a breakout of measles in her area that caused her to reassess, and she and her doctor had already drafted and started a catch-up vaccination schedule, but her kids caught whooping cough just before it could be started. Then she wrote a blog post for The Scientific Parent explaining how she and her husband had come to wrong decisions in the first place, how they changed their mind, the consequences they suffered as a result, and asking other parents to please vaccinate their kids. And now she’s an activist for destroying the misinformation of anti-vaxxers, and reaching out to anti-vaxxers because she’s understands their fears but knows their kids deserve better.
She was trying to the best for her kids and just didn’t know how to interpret the validity of information or its sources, an actual skill that can be actually difficult and that is under-taught and a necessary first step to being able to trust vaccination research, so chose no action over taking an action she wasn’t sure of. She kept looking into it with family and friends and even eventually came to the right conclusion before her kids became sick, but it was still too late.
Honestly it was pretty brave of her to publicly admit she was wrong. She could have just quietly vaccinated her kids and not become a national news story, but instead she spoke out, even saying “I’m writing this from quarantine, the irony of which isn’t lost on me.” and also “I am not looking forward to any gloating or shame as this ‘defection’ from the antivaxx camp goes public, but, this isn’t a popularity contest. Right now my family is living the consequences of misinformation and fear. I understand that families in our community may be mad at us for putting their kids at risk.”
She understood the consequences and still put herself and her story out there.
You know what, it does take a big person to admit they were wrong so publicly and work to undo the harm. I believe I made fun of her in the past, but timemachineyeah changed my mind.
“I never thought leopards would eat MY face, until I realized they totally would, and they will eat your face, too!” warns defector from the leopards-eating-faces party
The #1 trait of anti-vaxxers is not “they’re stupid” or “they fell for propaganda” but “they don’t know who’s safe to trust.”
The movement is pushed by women, especially suburban moms, because they know damn well you cannot trust doctors. You cannot trust the medical industry, the billion-dollar corporate zone of “you should lose some weight and maybe the pain will stop.” Cannot trust the ones who keep changing diet advice - is it no sugar? No carbs? No fats? Is it dangerous to let kids eat things in wild colors? Food pyramid: good or bad? They cannot trust the BMI chart that says they should lose 75 lbs to be “healthy.” (Whether or not they “should” lose 75 lbs, they know damn well that “healthy” does not describe any part of the journey to getting there.) Cannot trust the ones who keep giving them incomplete and sometimes incorrect information about contraception. The ones who said “that’s false labor; you have two weeks more” 12 hours before they gave birth. And so on.
So they have their kids, and they want so much for their kids to be safe, and the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.
So they ask: What about if there’s complications? An allergic reaction? Side effects?
And the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.
This is… not reassuring.
And they ask, My sister-in-law’s cousin had a really bad reaction to the MMR shot and I want to know how I can tell it’s safe for my kids.
And the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.
Throw in the right-wing/libertarian faction yelling YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO and the insurance companies saying “hey um you need a specific type of coverage for that; we probably cover those vaccinations but you’ll need this special paperwork to be sure” - and then you have the actual anti-vax propagandists yelling some combination of cherry-picked statistics and outright lies, and you get a whole lot of moms willing to say BUGGRE ALL THIS FOR A LARKE.
There is no amount of facts that can fix this. They’re swamped with facts from 300 directions. What they need to fix this is empathy and the kind of connections that lead to trust.
They need to trust that, even as the medical industry dismisses a whole lot of womens’ concerns, in this particular area, they’re right.
Add in the consequences of having a significant portion of your social support network tied up in a particular worldview, leaving it, much less openly condemning it, is really hard and means losing your community support. In a world where the system can’t be trusted to pick up that slack, Moms can’t afford to risk the change - until the cost of staying clearly outweighs the coat of pushing back, not just in general, but for their kids.
Kindness doesn’t just matter because it’s more ethical - it'salso a more effective strategy.
Reading reviews for havdalah candles written by unsuspecting Christian housewives who bought them to use for dinner candles is my new passion. I’ll be laughing for an eternity.
Imagine letting a candle burn that looks like this once lit:
For an hour.
Dude, get the wine!
Different havdalah candle, same guy.
For my goyische followers: Havdalah is a service to mark the end of shabbat and the beginning of the week. The flame is big so that everyone at the service can see it. You also only have it lit for a few minutes before extinguishing it (traditionally in wine). They are not table candles. My guess is that these people bought them because they’re pretty and braided without knowing or caring what they’re used for.
For my Jewish followers: the goyim are at it again.
It needs to be multiple wicks, and I think a tall flame is just what happens in that situation
There are two types of Jewish candle:
note for goyim: if you buy any candles that were originally designed for Jewish Purposes (except the aforementioned yahrzeit), the candle’s job is not to give a nice, cozy atmosphere for a few hours. its job is to be on fire and by G-d it does that very well
shared in one of my discords, sort of interesting
The phrase “the US kill line” has gone viral on Chinese social media in recent days, igniting extensive discussion about economic vulnerability and systemic risk within American society. The term is now used among netizens to describe a precarious financial state in which individuals or households have virtually no margin for error—where a single shock can trigger rapid and potentially irreversible collapse. The expression “kill line” itself originates from video games, where a “kill line” refers to a health threshold below which a character can be instantly defeated, regardless of remaining defenses or abilities. The newly aroused attention among Chinese netizens follows a video uploaded on December 8 to the Chinese online video-sharing platform bilibili.com by Chinese content creator “Sikuiqidawang,” titled Cutting Flesh with a Dull Knife and the Kill Line. In the video, he discusses the heavy burden of medical expenses on ordinary Americans and uses the phrase “kill line” as a metaphor for what he describes as a slow, grinding economic pressure. The creator also shared other videos with one depicting the difficult lives of homeless people and people from lower-income groups he encountered in Seattle.
The content of the article's completely accurate but I DO think it needs to be understood that The Global Times is a tabloid ltrl run by the CCP.
imo that makes things even worse of course: The Chinese Communist Party doesn't even need to LIE or exaggerate to show the US in a bad-light; our political system(and the ppl it elevates to "lead" us) are Just That Hostile to prosperity and human-thriving.
up next, the triangle.
we know what hole that goes in, right?
that's right, the square hole!
Except, critically, at bedtime.
Ravings and urges get miscoded over time. Let’s say you’re thirsty, and you live in a strawberry field. Strawberries contain some water and a bunch of sugar so, over time, you may start to crave strawberries when you are thirsty because you get a reward and some relief in shorter time from the need starting than the trek to the stream. This can happen for every need: sleep, food, whatever.
Trevor Noah has a great tip, that when he craves ice cream at night he breaks it down into parts: I want something cold, I want something sweet. He drinks a glass of cold water then waits to see if he still has the ice cream craving. Usually he doesn’t.
So listening to your body isn’t “follow every urge” but “decompose the urge to discover the underlying need.”
If you always feel like getting cozy in bed you may be: cold, dehydrated, and/or malnourished (maybe a need for high calories that are bioaccessible…not processed).
If you do not feel tired at bedtime you may: need to eat dinner earlier because your body is still digesting, need to exercise or go outside more during the day, get the fuck off your screen for an hour so your brain can enter sleep mode.
Hope this helps someone.
P.S. notice i said nothing about neurodivergence. Not that it’s not a likelihood but the over-pathologization of behaviors prevents us from taking simple actions to improve our wellbeing. Also, these tips are pretty accessible and applicable to most brain variations.
Neuroscience is the closest you're gonna get to a user's manual. This is all good advice.
"God never gives you more than you can handle" is survivorship bias. People who got more than they could handle are dead.
when the sun gets caught in a tree’s web 🌅 Credit @eric66699999
i think it is SO important to note that he could very well be just some dude the cops hoped to pin it on
that said, even IF he did do it, i hope he gets acquitted of all charges and the the entire nation celebrates hugely when he does just to send a fucking message to the people who get wealthier and wealthier the more they deny people healthcare services
all the CEOs and boardmembers of healthcare companies who use AI to auto-deny claims and who override doctor's decisions about what is necessary for a patient -- i want them to feel like they aren't safe in public. I want them to understand on a visceral level how upset we are at the current healthcare situation
Mozilla have basically always been exactly the same amount of "better than the competition". As everyone else backslides, they do too, just always at more or less the same moral offset.
It's like this graph I made up:
Getting worse over time, but always the better option at any given moment. (Unless you're in deep enough to have strong opinions about XUL or IceWeasel, in which case you're not my target audience right now.)
you ever realize how able bodied people just are not expected to do things that cause them excruciating physical pain? like they’re just. not
if i shouldn’t use my cane because i can sometimes technically walk without it, it would just hurt like a motherfucker then abled people should no longer be allowed to use potholders to take things out of the oven because i mean
well they could technically pick up a hot pan with their bare hands. it would just hurt like a motherfucker
*sees an abled person using potholders*
i just think it’s really sad that you’re giving up on yourself like that
Her name was Judy-Lynn del Rey. And she became the most powerful editor in science fiction history.
Born in 1943 with achondroplastic dwarfism, Judy-Lynn grew up devouring science fiction in New York City's public libraries. At a time when the genre was dismissed as pulp fiction for teenage boys, she saw something else entirely: the future of storytelling.
She started at the bottom—an office assistant at Galaxy, the most prestigious science fiction magazine of the 1960s. Within four years, she was managing editor.
Then Ballantine Books came calling.
When she arrived at Ballantine in 1973, science fiction and fantasy were afterthoughts in publishing. Fantasy in particular was considered unsellable—unless you were Tolkien. Judy-Lynn thought that was nonsense.
Her first major move was audacious: she cut ties with one of Ballantine's bestselling authors, John Norman, whose "Gor" novels were popular but notoriously misogynistic. It was a risk. She didn't care.
Then came the gamble that changed everything.
In 1976, someone brought her an opportunity: the novelization rights to an upcoming space movie by a young director named George Lucas. Hollywood thought the film would bomb. Studio executives were skeptical. Most publishers passed.
Judy-Lynn said yes.
The Star Wars novelization sold 4.5 million copies before the movie even premiered.
She would later call herself the "Mama of Star Wars."
In 1977, she launched Del Rey Books—her own imprint, with her husband Lester editing fantasy while she oversaw everything else. Their first original novel was Terry Brooks's The Sword of Shannara. It became a phenomenon.
She didn't stop there.
Remember The Princess Bride? The original 1973 novel had flopped. It was headed for obscurity. Judy-Lynn rescued it, reissuing it in 1977 with a striking gate-fold cover and an aggressive marketing campaign. Without her intervention, there might never have been a movie.
She published the Star Trek Log series. She championed Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant trilogy—convincing Ballantine to release all three books on the same day from a completely unknown author. Unprecedented.
She published Anne McCaffrey's The White Dragon—the first science fiction novel ever to hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.
And she did all of this while competitors called her imprint "Death-Rey Books"—because she was utterly dominant.
Between 1977 and 1990, Del Rey Books had 65 titles reach bestseller lists. That was more than every other science fiction and fantasy publisher combined.
Arthur C. Clarke called her "the most brilliant editor I ever encountered."
Philip K. Dick went further: "The greatest editor since Maxwell Perkins"—the legendary editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
But here's what burns: the science fiction community never nominated her for a Hugo Award while she was alive. Not once. The men who ran the industry praised her in private and overlooked her in public.
In October 1985, Judy-Lynn suffered a brain hemorrhage. She died four months later, at 42.
Only then did the Hugo committee vote to give her the Best Professional Editor award.
Her husband Lester refused to accept it.
He said Judy-Lynn would have objected—that it was given only because she had just died. That it came too late.
He was right.
Judy-Lynn del Rey transformed science fiction from a niche hobby into a cultural force. She made fantasy into a mainstream publishing category. She bet on Star Wars when no one else would. She saved The Princess Bride from oblivion. She published the first #1 New York Times science fiction bestseller.
She did all of this standing 4'1" tall in an industry run by men who underestimated her at every turn.
The next time you pick up a fantasy novel, or watch a Star Wars movie, or quote The Princess Bride—
Now you know who made it possible.
Christians love doing stuff like this and making such a person the face of their religion then turn around and get mad when they're (correctly) seen as insufferable.
Some of the same people upset a Muslim man is poised to be the mayor of New York. But sure, they give AF about supposed "religious discrimination".
Let my Black behind have thrown a fit like this and I'm sure the same crowd supporting this girl would be telling me to sit my DEI ass down.
i think some people are misunderstanding what this girl is doing as her being stupid: she (almost certainly) did this on purpose to get attention in the hopes of becoming a conservative media/social media darling. it's becoming a taught career strategy for young conservatives in the anglosphere, particularly white women. Get your name in the press - or your face on a talk show! - for standing up to Woke University with your Conservative Values, get a social media following, get a regular segment on a conservative news network or become a figure in the conservative party.
