Leighbooks

[divorce-enjoyer]

ice water is awesome because you get more water in your water

[jewish-joy]

Last year, I befriended a Catholic seminarian. We've gotten to be pretty decent friends. Seeing as he was staying in town for the summer and I wasn't, I entrusted him with caring for my plant.

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

Listen, totally cool. My plant becoming Catholic is a great deal for her not dying over the summer. But now I must navigate this interfaith household. Keep me in your thoughts.

[jewish-joy]

#i love prayer plants but they're fussy so I don't keep them#can we have a picture op they're so pretty

Behold, Dorothea

(Naming my plant "Gift of God," and then giving her to a seminarian with just the explanation that it's a prayer plant? Okay, that's my bad.)

[jewish-joy]

I should also add- I ran into my rabbi and explained the situation. I then asked, earnestly, if there was a remedy. A mikveh of sorts, or a beit din, or something.

He turned to me, sighed, and said in a very deadpan tone-- "Plants don't have covenants, Joy,"

So Dorothea's a free agent according to rabbinic opinion. I guess I'll permit her to be Roman Catholic.

[thewitchoftheweed]

We live in the dumbest, lamest cyberpunk dystopia possible.

So LA has been — and continues to — protest against ICE. These protests haven’t gotten any smaller or lost any momentum, but social media wasn’t reflecting it.

TikTok users, realizing that the platform/other social media are censoring/deleting/shadowbanning these protest videos, decided to find a workaround.

They’re calling it the LA Music Festival. Ice detention centers and other protest locations are “stages.” The hottest band is Rage Against the Machine. “Here’s what gear you should be bringing to stay safe at the LA Music Festival.”

And it fucking worked.

TikTok has become a proving ground for a lot of new music, meaning lots of labels and organizations have lucrative deals with TikTok to promote their new artists and music festivals. So they absolutely cannot censor the words “music festival” or train the algorithm to ignore it, or they risk endangering that very important revenue.

So now protest videos are flooding feeds again, but it’s the LA 24/7 Music Festival. Truly an incredible timeline we’ve landed in.

[transfemininomenon]

the phrase really should be "eat your cake and have it too" im with the unabomber on this one

[justheretobreakthings]

So within two days of each other, Fox News writes an article comparing aromanticism and asexuality to pedophilia, and then Matt Walsh releases a video saying asexuality is a mental illness and asexuals are tricking teenagers into having depression.

Not sure what’s going on right now over in Conservative World, but it’s a hell of wild U-turn for them to suddenly switch from “Oh no! The left is sexualizing our children!” to “Oh no! The left is asexualizing our children!”

[ohnoitstbskyen]

It’s a reminder, I guess, that they’re coming for all of us. The fash and the white supremacists will not make nice distinctions between the queers when they put us up against the wall. There is no gatekeeping, no label-policing, no purity-purging and no assimilation that any of us can do that will save us. They want us dead, and while they’ll start with whoever is most vulnerable at any given time, they’ll get around to all of us eventually.

Queer solidarity means all of us because the fash are coming for all of us.

[karmiccollector-deactivated2024]

All Dividers are Feds. Stand united or die separately.

[hazel2468]

ANYONE who is trying to divide our community is a fucking Fed. That includes other queers who like to argue about who is and isn’t “allowed” in our community.

[captainclickycat]

Tangential reminder that these “U-turns” start to make more sense when you consider that it’s not a matter of right-wing conservatives wanting people to be sexual or wanting them not to be sexual, it’s a matter of them wanting people to be sexual only within very specific parameters and only on their terms, never on our own.

Asexual and aromantic folks ultimately pose the same problem to them as gay people or women who won’t be submissive or “save themselves” for marriage or anyone else who doesn’t fit inside those parameters, because they’re not playing their role in this system correctly. They’re not doing what they’re told. So as far as these people are concerned, they need to be punished and forced in line same as everyone else.

[encodedincommotion-deactivated2]

it's crazy how plausible all the shit the corporations do in the murderbot diaries is. that one scene when murderbot was talking to those humans who had signed a 20 year corporate work contract and it asked them if the contract specified 20 years by the standard local calendar or by a proprietary calendar created by the company was downright unsettling 😬 if the ceos of modern earth companies read these books they would probably start crying because the government won't let them do most of this in real life.

[radioorpheus]

hey fun fact this has absolutely happened before. part of the push to standardize time/timezones was because factory employers had clocks set to the pace of their machinery. meaning of the workers were not doing enough, time would run slower until they had reached their goal. there is historical precedent.

[duckbunny]

[flameraven]

Yup. All the shit modern Capitalism is pulling is mostly a rework of the shit Capitalism did in the 1800s. This is WHY people fought and died to unionize and pass labor laws. Now those labor laws have been weakened or companies found loopholes (ie, gig workers are contract workers and not protected by many labor laws) so they're pulling the same shit again. The Corporation Rim, of course, HAS no labor laws so the companies have been able to crank up their evil to 11 because nothing is stopping them. It is genuinely a really good bit of worldbuilding on Martha Well's part, she's done a great job projecting the tech bro bullshit of our times into the future that Musk, Zuckerberg etc would build if they could.

[tahthetrickster]

did a bit of driving through the state of georgia today and wound up driving through a small town that i later discovered was called newborn, which is an odd name but doesn’t technically have anything wrong with it, except for the fact that i nearly gave myself whiplash doing a double-take at a building sign advertising NEWBORN TAXIDERMY

[o-craven-canto]

NEWBORN TAXIDERMY

your move, Hemingway

[notjusthespongenextdoor]

For a city to be walkable. It must also be sittable.

[notjusthespongenextdoor]

#every time I read this phrase the same thing happens#I read it as shittable and go wait that can't be right#oh right they were talking about public benches that makes more sense#but public bathrooms available without fees should also be a thing tho#cities should definitely be shittable#it happens EVERY SINGLE TIME

it must also be shittable

[depsidase]

[luulapants]

Got into a discussion about emergency response at a professional retreat recently and everyone was going on and on about agility, and I was like, "Okay but what about contingency?"

And they were like "What?"

And I was like, "Agility isn't the ultimate form of preparedness. Contingency is. Agility still requires you to flounder and figure out a solution in the moment, but if you have a contingency plan, all you have to do is implement it."

And they were like "But you can't make contingency plans for every situation!"

And I was like, "Yeah, you basically can if you just identify all of your basic dependencies and contingency plan around the loss of any dependency," and then I gave a few examples.

And they all stared at me like I'm an alien.

Anyway, that's how I figured out I'm Batman-coded and also learned how Batman must feel talking to supposedly professional superheroes who never bothered to run disaster scenarios until I pointed out that it's insane that they don't already have a plan for if Superman turns evil.

[nestofstraightlines]

There’s a phrase that really stuck in my head around this. It was from one of the British divers who enacted the Thai caving rescue, though I couldn’t tell you which one or which interview.

As he described to the interviewer a moment of panic and how he he overcame, the interviewer said, in one of those, summarise-last-answer-given-with-appropriate-levels-of-respect-in-order-to-proceed-to-next-question phrasing’s, “Wow, so you rose to the occasion -“

And the diver said, “No, actually people always get that exactly wrong. In an unexpected and urgent situation you don’t rise to the occasion. You sink to the level of your training.”

[throckmortons-thrussy]

[truestoriesaboutme]

I can't quite explain it, but Clue (1985), The Princess Bride (1987), Galaxy Quest (1999), and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) are all the same genre

[short-and-angry]

They aren't a spoof (roast) or a love letter (tribute), but a best man's speech; an expression of love with a gentle ribbing on ocassion.

[creekfiend]

gender essentialism is soooo funny bc it's like "this is what women are like" and you're like "I've met women and many of them, if not the majority, have not been like that" and it's like "well women SHOULD be like that" and you're like "why should women be like that" and its like "because that's what women are like"

[animperfectangelsblog]

[depsidase]

[isuggestrevolution]

i have a suggestion

[depsidase]

[flipocrite]

[redstonedust]

crazy how quickly dust accumulates. i should be allowed to put my trinkets on a shelf and not touch them and they remain in perfect condition forever. dont even get me STARTED on the inside of a computer. why do i have to brush your teeth. youre technology.

[soracities]

"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."

Ismatu Gwendolyn, "you've been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress)", from Threadings, on Substack [ID'd]

[paper-mario-wiki]

HEY wanna read but annoyed on where to find copies of books?

Here's an archive with millions of PDFs of books and papers and magazines and essays and stuff.

[meltedgarment]

I've been looking for such archives, thanks

[fealty-to-thee]

you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).

i was not going to publish this essay because i don’t like to yell but here the fuck i am.

the first link broke, here you go

[creatingblackcharacters]

BEGGING us to read nonfiction every now and then. Like. Words on page. It doesn't have to be the only thing you do, but you gotta keep in practice with it. No easier people to subjugate than those who question nothing they're told.

[depsidase]