at phoenix painted fur con! Come say hi if you're around Sat or Sun!
If you're in the US, now is a great time to talk to the young people in your life about the US military:
- The recruiter is not your friend. The military employs child psychologists to learn how to make you think the recruiter is your friend.
- The recruiter is allowed to lie to you and makes more money if they do.
- The recruiter is paid a commission to groom children into cannon fodder.
- The recruiter will tell you you're special and will go into special smart soldier programs instead of combat. They're lying.
- The recruiter may tell you they can tell if someone can get PTSD or not and only recruit people like you, who won't. They're lying.
- The recruiter may tell you you'll be too busy attending free college (!!) to go overseas. They're lying.
- The recruiter may ask what countries you want to travel to and promise you bougie placements on military bases in those countries. They're lying.
- Even "It's just four years!" is a lie - the government is allowed to hold you past your enlistment period with a stop-loss order.
- The recruiter actually has zero power to decide anything that happens to you after you enlist and they more importantly don't care what happens to you.
- If you enlist, you will be brainwashed to make you willing to do things to other humans that you would never be willing to do today.
- You will be ordered to do things that will kill children. And you'll do them.
- The military is not the only way or even the best way for you to go to college or start a career.
- Military brainwashing will actually make you into a terrible university student because it degrades your ability to think critically and question your sources.
- Having PTSD and/or a TBI will make it harder to be a student and keep a job.
- Veterans' benefits suck these days.
- Being a veteran drastically increases your risk of homelessness, suicide, alcohol and drug dependence, prison time, and becoming an abuser to your loved ones.
- The military will expose you to chemicals that will drastically increase your chances of developing cancer.
- The military will withhold information about your rights to conscientiously object after enlisting.
- A lot can change in four years.
I feel so corny saying "the concept of brainwashing was largely invented and deployed for the sole purpose of combatting communism" because to those Unaware it sounds like a conspiracy theory you'd make up to defend communism but like, that actually happened
the victim is evil for being weak
the victim is evil for being a reminder of harm
conservatism & liberalism respectively
It's hard to say this without sounding like a right wing dickhead, but the thing about progressive spaces is that they may naturally attract people who are always on the lookout for excuses to start a fight. Like you can find yourself faced with someone whose political outrage is totally justified, and whose humanitarian ideals are right on the money, but simultaneously they are carrying a ton of psychological baggage about being wronged and getting revenge, and they will exploit literally any opportunity to live out this psychodrama with anyone in their line of vision. I have thought of several related anecdotes since I started typing this post, but I'll limit myself to the thing that inspired it, which is that I just visited this ultra-lefty cafe/bike shop/community gathering space where I've heard that the proprietor is constantly in a fight with everyone around her. When I paid for my stuff I noticed that there was no tip option, but I thought I had heard something about this, so I snuck away to look at the website and it made me really glad I didn't ask! I think there should have been a really enticing and exciting way for her to say "I've decided to be the change I want to see in the world, so I'm paying my baristas a full living wage, I'm making sure EVERYONE feels welcome and comfortable here, and I'm selling products I believe in!" -- but instead all the web copy sounded more like "You're either with me or against me, you're a fucking piece of shit asshole if you can't handle the inclusive atmosphere here, and by the way tipping is for fascist cavemen and if you ever try to tip someone you are refusing to relate to them authentically and you are enforcing a dangerous and evil power dynamic that should be purged from human society (so therefore I pay my staff well)." Like everything she stood for was totally agreeable, but why did she have to put it like it was directed at her worst enemy, rather than at the kinds of people she wants to attract? If the word on the street is to be believed, the reason for this posturing is that she spends quite a lot of energy making as many enemies as possible, and she probably likes it that way. I guess I'm just reminding myself, and perhaps others, that while one might think of "politics" as being broadly social and theoretical, no individual can fully separate the political from the intimately personal. Even somebody who seems to want to uplift and protect their fellow humans may be getting some perverse inner satisfaction out of that valiant crusade, and you may never realize it until you find yourself in a confusing fight with them.
Have you ever had sex with a tumblr mutual?
my tiny menagerie together at last.
i've recently got back into sculpting, and these guys And More will be available in my shop December 8th at 6PM EST.
i will also be having a discount for my 30th birthday running until December 11th, 11:59 PM; use code NOMORE20S at check out to get 20% off your order and help me enter my 30s marginally less in debt 🎉🥳🙃🫠. Anything ordered within that window will be shipped the afternoon of the 12th, which should get it within the US and Canada in time for Christmas (sorry Hanukkah celebrants, i will do My Best for y'all).
Last day of this sale!
There's this interesting phenomenon where when you're a child, or some other vulnerable minority dependent on a job for shelter, you are actually under duress almost constantly. You can't say "I don't want to work today," you cannot say "I don't want to do the dishes, actually," you cannot choose not to participate. In a lot of cases, the punishment is explicit. Your parents might yell at you. Your boss might fire you. But in other cases, it's implicit. The mood will sour. You lose leeway. People get mad at you. And that creates a really shitty environment where you're constantly being coerced to do things!
And here's the kicker; you're not allowed to acknowledge that. You cannot acknowledge that you are being coerced, you cannot acknowledge that your free will is not being respected, because that's punished too. Your boss insists that you act excited. Your parents punish you for acting surly. You are forced to fake enthusiastic consent, constantly. It's a fucking nightmare. Your hand is being forced, you do not have the option to say "no," and if you ever, for a second, try to acknowledge that, everyone acts like you're the aggressor.
This post might have been what got my blog deleted lmao
my tiny menagerie together at last.
i've recently got back into sculpting, and these guys And More will be available in my shop December 8th at 6PM EST.
i will also be having a discount for my 30th birthday running until December 11th, 11:59 PM; use code NOMORE20S at check out to get 20% off your order and help me enter my 30s marginally less in debt 🎉🥳🙃🫠. Anything ordered within that window will be shipped the afternoon of the 12th, which should get it within the US and Canada in time for Christmas (sorry Hanukkah celebrants, i will do My Best for y'all).
my tiny menagerie together at last.
i've recently got back into sculpting, and these guys And More will be available in my shop December 8th at 6PM EST.
i will also be having a discount for my 30th birthday running until December 11th, 11:59 PM; use code NOMORE20S at check out to get 20% off your order and help me enter my 30s marginally less in debt 🎉🥳🙃🫠. Anything ordered within that window will be shipped the afternoon of the 12th, which should get it within the US and Canada in time for Christmas (sorry Hanukkah celebrants, i will do My Best for y'all).
my tiny menagerie together at last.
i've recently got back into sculpting, and these guys And More will be available in my shop December 8th at 6PM EST.
i will also be having a discount for my 30th birthday running until December 11th, 11:59 PM; use code NOMORE20S at check out to get 20% off your order and help me enter my 30s marginally less in debt 🎉🥳🙃🫠. Anything ordered within that window will be shipped the afternoon of the 12th, which should get it within the US and Canada in time for Christmas (sorry Hanukkah celebrants, i will do My Best for y'all).
my tiny menagerie together at last.
i've recently got back into sculpting, and these guys And More will be available in my shop December 8th at 6PM EST.
i will also be having a discount for my 30th birthday running until December 11th, 11:59 PM; use code NOMORE20S at check out to get 20% off your order and help me enter my 30s marginally less in debt 🎉🥳🙃🫠. Anything ordered within that window will be shipped the afternoon of the 12th, which should get it within the US and Canada in time for Christmas (sorry Hanukkah celebrants, i will do My Best for y'all).
i never use this site so my year in review is fantastic
i feel like we could bring about 10 million dudes into communism if we explained it in terms of ultimate guitar dot com
okay so u know how back in 2006 we had this vast repository of crowdsourced guitar tabs created by the collective efforts of thousands of people dating back to the earliest days of the internet?? and it was awesome and u could get anything u needed for the low low cost of seeing a Shoot Bin Laden And Win An Iphone banner ad?? and then it got taken over by profit-motivated corporate dickheads and a bunch of it got paywalled, even though the actual work was done by nameless volunteers who did that shit for free because they wanted to share their knowledge?? okay now imagine that this happened to Everything