Marisa Mockery

please vote for tylenol to have her face on a beer can $1 for 1 vote and the donation goes to the baltimore animal rescue and care shelter

TYLENOL HAS MADE IT INTO THE TOP TEN LETS FUCKING GO

VOTE NOW SO WE CAN SEE TYLENOL'S FACE ON BEER CANS IN THE DITCHES BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD!!!

If you all will allow me a moment to analyze the competition as it exists, there's something interesting going on with the numbers.

As we all know, thanks to the support of the good people of Tumblr, Tylenol has experienced a meteoric rise to second place. Even though her competition is stiff, I believe in Tylenol's ability to go the distance.

But let's take a look at the competition:

Elmer seems to be a lovely boy. I have no qualms with Elmer, and think he would look fantastic on a beer can. But what about Elmer's campaigns? Who is the power behind the throne here, and how have they managed to find such breakout success on this competition?

A handful of wealthy donors are trying to buy this competition.

At the end of the day, all donations are good donations here. This is a charity event so every penny earned is going to help animals in need. But it's not lost on me that Elmer's current ranking is thanks entirely to a few individuals with the financial means to put their thumbs on the scale.

Tylenol's donors, comparatively, are small and numerous, mostly $1-10 donations from many passionate believers in what she stands for (autism and pain relief I think).

Overall, the donations tell a very different story than what the base ranking shows you. Elmer is held aloft by just 24 donors and bolstered by a few wealthy patrons, whereas Tylenol has won the hearts of literally hundreds of people. Even the current third place, Abby, owes her ranking to numerous small contributions rather than one or two large ones.

Tylenol is the people's princess.

Tylenol is the people's princess

flexapro

Good news!

garbage-empress

Tylenol is real! I love you Tylenol!

sreegs

A vote for Tylenol is a vote for the people

I have voted for Tylenol, it's only a dollar!

please vote for tylenol to have her face on a beer can $1 for 1 vote and the donation goes to the baltimore animal rescue and care shelter

TYLENOL HAS MADE IT INTO THE TOP TEN LETS FUCKING GO

VOTE NOW SO WE CAN SEE TYLENOL'S FACE ON BEER CANS IN THE DITCHES BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD!!!

If you all will allow me a moment to analyze the competition as it exists, there's something interesting going on with the numbers.

But let's take a look at the competition:

A handful of wealthy donors are trying to buy this competition.

Tylenol's donors, comparatively, are small and numerous, mostly $1-10 donations from many passionate believers in what she stands for (autism and pain relief I think).

Tylenol is the people's princess.

#okay this is adorable #the people's doggie

Tylenol is the people's princess

flexapro

Good news!

garbage-empress

Tylenol is real! I love you Tylenol!

sreegs

A vote for Tylenol is a vote for the people

animentality

bobcatmoran

I absolutely blame Facebook for this shift. Words cannot describe how freaking WEIRD it was in the mid-00s when there was suddenly this popular website where you were required to use your real, brickspace name and encouraged to post photos of yourself. Every single bit of Standard Internet Safety prior to then said that you should never ever ever do either of those.

delphinidin4

omg 2005/2006. When all our parents, who had been telling us for YEARS to never use our real names on the internet, suddenly all got facebook accounts and started using their real names on the internet like it was totally normal. Complete mental whiplash. Before then, it was WEIRD to use your real name on the internet. Like, people who did that were weirdos.

arctic-hands

[Image Description: initial tweet by Mini Modu, @ MinModulation, that says "The idea of the internet as a third space for co-identities, 'avatars', 'pseudonyms', doesn't really exist for normies. They love selfies and I.Ds--the net is purely a marketing platform for their Face, like the mall. They lo..." the tweet gets cut off as it's retweeted by SuRge, @ SRG_Works, who adds "The fact that normies never embraced the idea that the 'net was a great place to have 'alter egos' and just be free from insane societal pressure really is wild. Instead they used the Internet to double down and make it for non-conformists to escape." End I.D]

sunderwight

It really is difficult to describe how bizarre that felt, isn't it?

Like imagine you spend most if not all of your childhood hearing "don't feed the bears" and all the reasons why that's a terrible idea. So okay you agree, while life might sometimes present the temptation to feed some bears it's a bad idea and you'll never do it. Still plenty of ways to enjoy nature, after all!

Then one morning you wake up and all the adults and organizations who spent so much time and energy on hammering home that you never, ever, ever feed the bears, are enthusing over this new Bear Feeding Park! Where all you do all day long is go feed bears! And absolutely you must get to the Bear Feeding Park and start hanging out there and throwing parties there and feeding bears, making sure all the important milestones of your life or even just mundane things feature, to some extent, a visit to Bear Feeding Park. Where you feed bears.

And you're like... well, if nothing else, is it somehow less dangerous to feed bears now? The answer to which is no. Not at all. Bear attacks skyrocket to an all-time high and stay there. Somehow this does not actually seem to deter anyone. You suggest that maybe this is a sign that Bear Feeding Park is a bad idea and people are like, oh no, we just need to find other ways to stay Bear Aware. We can't give up going to Bear Feeding Park, after all! You can't get hired unless you've got a good reputation at Bear Feeding Park!

Yeah I'm still not over it. What in the good goddamn fuck, actually.

Even on fb I never used my real name, location, etc, and I've never regretted it. People tried to troll me sometimes by perusing my profile and making fun of the fact my job was Pokemon Master and my location was Middle Earth, but frankly I've never been cyberstalked so I did something right.

nihidea-art

Murderbox

alternate version under the cut because I couldn't decide

Very cool

unidentifiedspoon

ok this time i made it all the way through chapter 5 before i filled the page!!! we're moving at BREAKNECK SPEED

reading AC i have to remind myself it doesnt have drones yet. murderbot doomed to at least occasional eye contact

It was so happy when it got drones again

lohikaar

as the waters recede- G, 2.2k, no romantic relationships

I wrote a Pacific Rim/Murderbot Diaries fusion for @mutualrapport ! I had so much fun with this event and prompt, and am super excited to share more of this jaeger pilot, the Asshole RABIT Chaser, and the world they live in soon :)

Gonna read this later

yearofdoodles

The crossover no one asked for 💖

Kinda a sequel to this comic

livebloggingmydescentintomadness

It probably wasn't, they have insane processing power and storage and near perfect memory...

securityunit-ese

idk who to credit for the original meme but i really needed an updated version

creature-wizard

So, you know how certain Christian missionaries are trained to act in a very obnoxious way, so that most people they preach to will reject them outright, so they feel like the world hates them for being Christian and they can only be friends with fellow Christians? You know that thing?

I think as activists, we sometimes need to stop and ask ourselves whether we're acting like those missionaries. I think this type of behavior is a little more ingrained into our society than some of us realize, and some of us have internalized it without realizing what it's actually meant to do.

penrosesun

OP I know that this is probably a different direction than you were going, but genuinely this advice would do so so much to help people not fall into secular political cults.

A lot of high control groups use this tactic to isolate their members. It’s absolutely not just evangelizing Christians. New age wellness cults often encourage their members to make outlandish and offensive accusations regarding the mental and physical health of other people or their children, because they know that the backlash their members receive will reinforce the idea that the “mainstream” simply has no room for people who like crystals and essential oils. White supremacist cults will seed the vocabulary of new recruits with Nazi dog whistles that fly over those recruits heads, specifically so that they will get clocked as possible neo-Nazis and shunned by anyone who might offer them another perspective and help them to get out before it’s too late. And a lot of left-leaning political cults strongly encourage members to share their views in the most inflammatory ways possible, and then say “you see? everyone outside of this small circle is evil and cannot be relied on” when, inevitably, that produces bad results.

Sometimes I think that activists fall into these patterns completely accidentally, either because they were raised in culturally Christian evangelical environments and never unpacked it, or else because they just aren’t any good at approaching things in a non-inflammatory way and no one’s shown them how.

…But sometimes, these structures emerge in activist circles because those circles are legitimately becoming high control groups.

I think some things to watch out for especially in this regard are:

Are you being directed to behave in an extremely hostile and alienating way? (even if it’s by someone who you trust!)

Does the group you are in immediately shut down any conversation about the effectiveness of an antagonistic strategy? In particular, do they shut that conversation down using in-group stock phrases?

Is experiencing harsh rejection seen as something of a rite of passage?

Do you receive more validation from the group you are in after you have been rejected by someone outside the group than at any other time?

Have you ever been concerned that the antagonistic strategy you are using hurt someone you cared about, only to be quickly advised by members of the group that that person was toxic and that you should actually completely cut them out of your life?

These to me are all pretty significant red flags about the group in question, whatever the specific thing that brings people together there is. If you start noticing them in a group that you are a part of, be that an in-person activist circle or a Discord server or anything in between, take a step back and seriously consider the possibility that the good thing that you joined is turning into something different, and possibly dangerous.

In the words of Jonestown survivor Deborah Layton, “Nobody joins a cult. You join a self-help group, a religious movement, a political organization. They change so gradually, by the time you realize you’re entrapped – and almost everybody does – you can’t figure a safe way back out.”

this is a pdf detailing the BITE model of authoritarian control, a method for determining whether or not you're in a cult.

even if you feel confident you are not and have never been in a cult, it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with the signs, just in case one begins to sneak up on you in the future.

penrosesun

Ok, I actually want to talk about this for a moment.

Jonestown, one of the most infamous cults in history, with a mass suicide / mass murder that left more than 900 people dead of cyanide poisoning, hundreds of whom were children… was a leftist political cult. That fact is an unambiguous and completely undebatable matter of historical record.

This isn’t a footnote in the story of Jonestown, and it isn’t a weird anti-leftist gotcha either. Jonestown attracted people to their cause with anti-segregation and anti-poverty activist work, and they did actual, meaningful good for those causes. The People’s Temple was a leftist org, unambiguously. They created mutual aid networks for food aid, and rent assistance, and job placement services, and clothing donations, and winter heating. They leaned heavily on the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission in order to push desegregation, and led sit-ins and boycotts and protests. They participated in significant voter registration efforts. They led the fight against the eviction of tenants from San Francisco's International Hotel.

People joined The People’s Temple because it was a good thing when they joined it. They didn’t start out as brainwashed cultists, and they didn’t gravitate towards the leadership of Jim Jones out of masochism, or inherent submissiveness, or a perverse love of creeping authoritarianism. They fell in line under Jim Jones because he’d built a community that was genuinely helping people, and was advancing a political cause that seemed worth fighting. They followed Jim Jones because he earned their trust.

Jim Jones then used the trust and the social capital that he had gained from all of the above in order to elevate himself to the status of a messianic figure, and abuse and profit off of his followers. Slowly but surely, he boiled the frog. It was all good – and then it was mostly good – and then, well there was some abuse, but it wasn’t that bad, and it wasn’t really his fault – and then there was a lot of abuse, but the outside world would destroy them if given the chance, so wasn’t it the lesser of the two evils? And then, eventually, it got so bad that hundreds of people poisoned themselves and their children at his command, and murdered everyone in the compound who refused and resisted.

Your cause of choice is not immune from abusers taking advantage of it!

It doesn’t matter if you’re right. It doesn’t matter if your cause is just. It does not matter if your good thing really is a good thing, because there is always the possibility that it will one day be co-opted by a monster. And if the fact that it started good is enough for you to ignore that gradual, subtle change, you could end up in a truly horrible situation.

One of my best friends in undergrad got sucked into a cult. Years later, we talked about it, and he told me something that I’ll never forget which is, it’s only when you look all the way back at things that they seem crazy. You start off with things that are totally normal and innocuous: “we’re stronger together”; “oppression is bad”; “you can accomplish more if you believe in yourself”; “empathy is important and we should all try to bring more of it into our lives”; etc. Then, you move to something that’s just a little step away from that. And then again. And then again. And then again. But it never feels like a big jump, because it’s not! A -> Z is crazy, but A -> B wasn’t, and B -> C wasn’t, and C -> D wasn’t, and…

This friend was smart, and rational, and independent, and normal, and by the time he and his wife left, they’d gone from just thinking that we should all practice more emotional mindfulness, to being terrified that leaving the cult and the cult leader would literally kill them, via the cult leader having magical powers.

If your only analysis is “Where I started was good, and no single step since then has been crazy” that is utterly insufficient to keep you safe.

“This can’t possibly be a cult, because when I joined it was a leftist political org and there’s never been a single instance where it suddenly changed” is literally the exact logic that kept people in Jonestown until it was too late.

securityunit-ese

If ghosts exist in the mbd universe, I would imagine the #1 source of ghosts in a hyper-capitalist society with little worker protection would probably be ghosts who died due to company neglect OR the ghosts who dont realize they are dead and keep trying to work.

And as a SecUnit, I think that makes Murderbot the character most likely to have had a paranormal experience, having worked in shitty mines and labor camps.

Therefore I think it would be fucking hilarious if one of the crew or part of Mensah's family brought up the topic of ghosts expecting SecUnit to be tell them they are being irrational. And instead! SecUnit nonchalantly say something like no ghosts are real as fuck. Here's the footage.

And then SecUnit goes back to its soap opera, as if it didnt just definitively answer a major question about life and what comes after death on a wednsday afternoon over pizza

OHHH YES OHHH the hilarious potential of SecUnit just dropping that on them and with PROOF through its tendency to autoplay videos!!

Thinking of the Mensahlings afraid to sleep at night. Or maybe they're not afraid to know they're not alone?

And oh the angst potential of SecUnit seeing dead people all over the place, especially on its jobs, and then coming to Preservation and seeing people who passed away old and (mostly) HAPPY!!

The question is, in this world.

Do SecUnit's leave behind ghosts as well?

I like the idea they do, MB just refuses to acknowledge them. You have to have a soul to be a ghost.

beardedmrbean

Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.

Kids books is probably not the best way to word it, you can enjoy them at every age, including your childhood, as you get older you may find new truths in them, but they're still good for any age.

I read all sorts of classics as a kid, not just the Hobbit. It was normal. I'm really sad for the next generation that reading isn't normal.

Awwwwww.

Chapters: 4/4 Fandom: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells Rating: General Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: ART | Perihelion/Murderbot, ART | Perihelion & Iris, Iris & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries) Characters: Iris (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), ART | Perihelion Additional Tags: Fluff, Mutual Pining, Established Relationship, Murderbot is bad at feelings, Murderbot is bad at communication, Short & Sweet, Humor, POV Multiple, masters degree in miscommunications, Demiromantic Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries) Summary:

I sat there, completely stunned. “What?”

It was sitting right next to me on the bench. Determinedly staring straight ahead.

“I said, I want to ask ART to marry me.”

Hearing the second time didn’t make me process the sentence any better. “No, I heard you the first time.” I replied. “I just never expected… I thought… I mean obviously I’m very happy for you two…”

- OR -

This is what happens when two queer disasters love each other.

tarositos

congrats for coming out

enigmaris

I do think, for the Eridians monitoring the biodome, that Grace is the equivalent to the Devil's Hole Pupfish. This life form is constantly trying to die, it lives in an absurdly specific set of temps, pressures, and radiation conditons that are so inhospitable to life as you know it, as to to be comical.

It takes up an abusrd amount of land to keep healthy, to the point that you have to cordon off acres of land around the habitat to make sure nothing goes wrong.

As far as you know this could be only living specimen left alive, it is critically endangered. It lives for such a short amount of time too.

But like, come on, hes just a little guy.

Anytime a single eridian suggests that maybe the human doesnt need that many resources allocated towards its survival, those scientists thrum to create another facility that costs 12 billion dollars to build so that they can manufacture vanilla flavor for his nutrient shakes.

He's their little guy. Their weird, wet, unique, biologically inefficient guy.