Its actually so important to me that Ryland Grace is a teacher. Not a professor, not someone at the top of their field teaching the smartest people, but a middle school science teacher. Of course he figured out how to communicate with an alien in under a day. His main expertise is explaining complex subjects to a group that doesnt have the vocabulary or context to fully understand them. He knows exactly how to simplify things down to its core principles without sacrificing any of the scientific logic. And he knows how to do it without having to throw around hyperspecific terminology.
“This is big tech in 2026. It is no longer about building cool apps, useful devices, or worthwhile services. Instead, all big tech can do is desperately take things that worked and slap new coats of paint on them endlessly while shoving in more AI features, ads, and paywalls in a desperate attempt to convince shareholders that they are making big changes as they do whatever it takes to make that number go up.”
— Google Kills Fitbit App And Everyone Hates Its Crappy Replacement
when i was a tiny baby queer (aka a 24-year-old), i went to my first pride festival probably three months after i kicked ex-gay therapy to the curb and came out to my parents. being the people they are, my parents came with me. they weren’t really sure about this whole gay thing, but they loved me and wanted me to be safe and happy and wanted to be involved in what was important to me, so they came along. (i also think my mother still might have thought i might get drugged or murdered or beaten by a protester of which there were plenty.)
anyway i wanted a memento of my first pride, you know, and this one vendor was selling keyrings, and i liked it, so i bought one. do you remember those italian charm bracelets that were all the rage like 10-15 years ago? it was a keychain like that, and it had a rainbow rooster, a rainbow cat, and then just a rainbow, and so I bought it.
i run into my mom a couple of vendors over and she goes oh you bought something? what’d you get? so i showed her, and i was like, “I’m not sure why it’s a rooster and a cat. Seems kind of random. But I liked the rainbows.”
and my mom, who was some form of minister’s wife for most of my childhood and teenagerhood, stares at me like she thinks i’m joking.
“What?” i say.
“…it’s a cock and a pussy, Jules,” she says flatly, and that is the story of how i died at the age of 24 while attending my first pride festival.
As a society we have benefited so much from successful public health measures that we now have the privilege of declaring that we must not need them anymore
Bitch before enriched flour, neural tube defects like spina bifida were far more common. Even now, spina bifida clinicians and researchers are begging to have salt and maize fortified to reach groups that don’t use as much flour. Before iodized salt, the United States had a fucking GOITER BELT. Eleven years after the introduction of fluoridated water, a city in Michigan found the rate of dental caries among school children dropped a staggering 60%— in an era where tooth decay regularly fucking killed people
I’m literally not even going to start on vaccines, which are among the most successful and robustly studied public health measures in world history
You might say “oh well today we all have access to vitamins and toothpastes and dentists so we don’t need those things in our food supplies” and boy do white people on social media loooove to fucking say that. But here’s the thing: no, people don’t all have easy access to those things. That’s privilege talking yet again
Glasgow Zine Library needs of renovations in order to safely store and display their zine collection, and improve accessibility.
Good news: They are currently only £500 away from their £12,726 goal, and for every donation made, Creative Scotland will double that money.
Bad news: This is an all-or-nothing fundraiser, so if they don't meet that goal before June 13th, they get nothing.
From their fundraiser:
"Our ability to safely and accessibly store, preserve, and display our zine collection is in jeopardy. In addition, we are running out of space to continue accepting zine donations. That is why we urgently need to upgrade our collection storage and display to increase capacity, accessibility, and improve preservation.
Our archive, which holds the entirety of our collection, is running out of space to safely and accessibly store and preserve the zines. As a result, the condition and future of our zine collection is at risk of rapid decline due to insufficient storage and preservation capacity.
We have reached capacity, turning away major donations, and (with permissions) donating duplicates.
Reaching capacity of our archive means that we have to turn away zine donations and halt zine acquisition of cultural objects. For instance, we turned away 249 issues of historically significant literary zine, 100 issues of an important writing zine, and a large collection of music zines and magazines. Another donor wants to bequeath a significant 1980-90s zine collection including historical trans zines.
Currently, we do not have the capacity to store and preserve them. Without this project we cannot properly preserve the collection or sustain zine donation intake."
I've been attending Glasgow Zine Fest for a few years now, and the work they do not only preserving such a variety of voices, but supporting new zine makers and local communities is amazing. They've run fundraisers for Palestine and refugees, coding meetups for trans folks, and anti-capitalist writing workshops.
I'm really hopeful they'll be able to make this deadline, but I've donated as much as I can. If any of yous have some to spare, please consider it. And consider visiting, as well!!
Me: *Removes my cat from my lap to do something else.*
My cat: Father is...evil? Father is unyielding? Father is incapable of love? I am running away. I am packing my little rucksack and going out to explore the world as a lone vagabond. I can no longer thrive in this household.
I am so incredibly glad we finally moved on from "i can has". Cats are clearly smart enough for advanced sentence structure and dumb enough to draw entirely incorrect conclusions about what they're talking about.
My cat, banging the cabnet door over and over and over: bang bang bang
Me: you will not earn what you desire by banging the cabinet door.
My cat: This is a test of wills, is it not? We shall see if your ability to put up with my incessant banging outlasts my eternal lust for snackie treats. Years of conditioning have hardened me for this purpose. bang bang bang
Me: ksst!
My cat, throwing herself to the ground like she's been shot: Oh! Oh I have been assailed in my own home! Have mercy, have pity! Surely in the cruel darkness of your heart there is some mote of goodness that might stay your hand! Do not strike me, I pray you!
Me: ok
My cat, after waiting about 3 minutes: bang bang bang
i know rocky still technically got to play with the measuring tape in the movie but the way it happened in the book always makes me smile when I read it. :]
Anita Sarkeesian, feminist who interpreted media under a feminist lens. She did a series about video games and she was the subject of targeted harassment. That was the start of gamergate
Minor correction, the start of gamergate was based around a different reporter, Zoe Quinn, but they were both absolutely violently threatened over their involvement in video game criticism and development. A hate campaign was started by Quinn's ex-boyfriend when he wrote a post falsely accusing them of dating video game journalists in order to receive positive reviews on their own game, Depression Quest, which led other bad actors to accuse all women in the industry (Zoe identified as female at the time) of perceived sexual immorality. Anita Sarkeesian's brilliant Youtube series Tropes vs Women in Video Games (which everyone should watch, right now) sparked a particular nerve for criticizing popular games of killing and/or victimizing any important female character (there is a CHILLING bit that borders on ludicrous where she describes the plots of a seemingly endless parades of games as "In [title], [male player character's] wife dies, and you then have to rescue [his] daughter."). That series did actually make a huge change in the industry, especially when touted by progressive legacy developers like Tim Schafer (Monkey Island, Psychonauts), who went on to expand hiring in his company to front women and minority voices, but the shift didn't really show for a long time and echoes of the sexism that plagues the industry at its core are still rampant.
In all seriousness, if you live in the US and you aren't familiar with the misogynistic harassment these people in the game industry faced during Gamergate, you need to watch this series right now.
This was the beggining of the current form of the US fascist movement and it underpins the entire thing about it to this day. If you live in the US and Gamergate isn't familiar to you, you're missing critical history to understanding US fascism. I'm not joking even a little bit here, you will understand modern United States fascism so much better if you are familiar with Gamergate.
Not an exaggeration. Gamergate led directly to the redpill/incel movement, which white supremacists exploited and colonized. Not to say that most of the white men in those movements weren't already racist to some extent, but that wasn't an active part of their politics until white supremacist recruiters came along and convinced them that the women ruining their videogames were part of the conspiracy to destroy the white race.
That's a very brief summary but you can go back step by step over the past decade and see how they did it.
I'm not a video game player/enjoyer/consumer in any form or fashion; the closest I get is playing phone games exclusively for money, because if you "should" (absolutely not) do the things you love for money, then you should definitely do things you don't love for money.
But
As a person who was socialized female, I appreciated Sarkeesian for saying, 'hey, why are video games playing up the knight in shining armor/damsel in distress storyline? Women play video games too, and we're tired of being portrayed as damsels in distress'. I absolutely agree. Perhaps in some alternate reality, game devs could have really gone for that female demographic--NOT with pink and babies and horses and mermaids, but just taking out that focus on the knight in shining armor trope; offering more Samus Arans.
((My thoughts on this got a little carried away, so))
However, the absolute deluge of men boys who play video games (at the time, most of these people were either barely out of high school or otherwise rather young, and otherwise behaving in a penis-clutching, juvenile way) and were absolutely frothingly misogynistic about Sarkeesian made me second-guess my own understanding of what she was talking about and how I felt about that.
This absolute--maybe there's a word, rather than me just saying frothingly misogynistic again, and adding, being afraid of ....like, being reminded?? That women also play video games??--it definitely didn't attract me to the video gaming sphere, and honestly, only made me form negative associations with men about my age who play video games. And the more 'men' I date who play video games the way some sharks swim to stay alive, the more this negative association is reinforced.
While my male, severely autistic cousin was the first person to convince me to play video games before I even started elementary school, honestly, I only played with him because it was cool to try something new. The first people to really really try to interest me in video games.......were all girls. They really thought they'd hook me, but 🤷♀️ I'm sorry, I just don't find them interesting. Each of my exes have also tried.
I don't remember Sarkeesian's exact words, but even as someone who doesn't especially enjoy video games, I appreciated that she thoroughly, thoughtfully laid out her thesis in the handful of videos that I watched.
Just for the sake of argument, let's say she was somehow wrong and like, it isn't unnecessary to over-feminize Mrs Pacman.
Instead of responding rationally and saying, here's my thesis on how your thesis is wrong, these boys just went knee-jerk and torch-and-pitchforks over girls playing tThHeEiIrRr video games.
Really. I do not want to look at the history of gamergate.......like, I just do not care about video game culture........buuuttttt if it really does run that deep, it would be valuable to educate myself. The whole gamergate thing is just yet another fucking exhausting example of overgrown man-children being allergic to women in their spheres. Except, so far, instead allowing themselves to be driven out, as it has been with being secretaries and academia, these overgrown children either try to harass women out of 'their' sphere, or these women have to make themselves as unthreatening as possible in order to--they don't even get taken seriously; they get fetishized and men think it's okay to say whatever the fuck vile shit they like to these women. You "can't" just be an "ugly" woman and show up in your sweatpants with no makeup, hair barely done, and enjoy video games. You "have to" show up for the male gaze.
Sorry for the essay (?)
I'd like to dumbly ask, how did this whole video game misogyny to fascism evolution happen? But honestly, even before doing any kind of research, I can pretty certainly say, it happened because of people like myself who had no interest in video game culture, and we allowed video game culture to largely fester in "mom's basement", irl as much as online. Personally, I'd say the number of people I encounter, like at work or in other social settings, for whom video games are a primary hobby or focus, is really, really minimal; I've only encountered a handful in my entire life. So, from my perspective, gamers are pretty out of sight, out of mind. I.E. They probably stay much more socially isolated, especially irl, than even your average writer.
Which makes it difficult to air out this festering, stewing misogyny and now, it seems it's too late for prevention. Now all we can really do is course correct, and try to be more proactive the next time a community is stewing in isolation.
When my mother forgets a word, she is the queen of coming up with new words. Words that would take a third National Treasure movie to fully decipher. I was talking to her yesterday, and she said this: “You know the time for los jibbities is coming up. You must be so excited!” Oh, is it time for los jibbities already? I must have missed it on my calendar. Are we celebrating something? “Of course! We should all be celebrating, shouldn’t we?” OK, so los jibbities is a happy thing. It’s not like something is giving you the heebie-jeebies, which would have been my one and only guess. “Los heebie-jeebies? Now you’re making things up...and this is my show.” You’re right. The time for los jibbities is coming up. Is this a season? “Yes, the season for love. The season for pride.” OK, los jibbities. “Yeah, sound it out.” Los…jibbities. LGBTs! “Sí, mira cuz you’re gay!” “You couldn’t just say pride season? You couldn’t just… *laughs*
The polar opposite of corporate accounts trying to come across as hip and super friendly are the ones for libraries, aquariums, parks systems and the like, that are basically just trying to get people excited about learning and the wonder of history/science by posting things like this:
turnnoffyourmind
origamiaround
pixelskylines
stormborns
gummygunk
titsay
areudirty
