I was raised agnostic and tend to remain ambiguous on theological matters.
-but my house has a porch on the second story that affords me a terrific view of my neighborhood and the Colorado Front Range and I was partaking of some peace before the 4th Of July Finger-Loss Festivities begin, and I have had a
~*Spiritual Experience*~
I just watched my neighbor try to unload an actual wooden pallet that had to have been forklifted into the back of his insecurity pickup worth of fireworks.
Except that he does not have a forklift in his garage.
He does have so much sports memorabilia and cardboard boxes of unsold MLM Merchandise and patriotically themed camping gear and posters of women in bikinis and flags of suspect political organizations in his garage that there is only
BARELY
enough space for the fireworks
and certainly none for his truck.
So he had to unload the individual boxes of recreational explosives from the back of his truck and stack them in the minimal space he had cleared by hand.
This is a tedious and time-consuming process as this neighbor has purchased a wide variety of recreational and locally illegal explosives instead of many of just a few types, so the individual boxes are rather small.
He begins,
and this is crucial to what happens next,
by cutting apart the industrial-grade saran wrap his explosives dealer had so carefully wrapped his merchandise in, and discarded it
unsecured
on his lawn.
Where Outdoor Conditions sometimes happen.
His process for unloading the fireworks is to
1. Climb up through the gate into the bed of his pickup truck (a feat made unusually difficult due to the slope of his driveway, and this man's fascinating decision to wear the world's Siffest and least Flexible Denim Overalls.
2. Once in the pickup bed, he selects ONE (1) box from the pile
He is apparently from a niche religious institution that doesn't believe in stacking things.
3. Carries it awkwardly around the palette that barely fits in the truck bed
4. His wife yells "Be careful!" when he nearly falls out of the pickup.
5. He Yells "SHADDUP!" back at her.
6. The Large German Shepherd barks from inside the house.
7. He yells "SHADDUP!" back at her too.
8. He sets the (1) box down on the gate
9. Slowly and awkwardly climbs out of the pickup bed
10. picks the box back up, and carries it into the garage.
Question: Aren't you going to help this poor man?
Answer: Absolutely Not.
There's four military veterans, MANY dogs, and several people with dementia in this neighborhood, all of whom are terrified by this chicanery every year and many neighbors have repeatedly asked him to maybe do the fireworks somewhere else.
(This is the Eighth Year Running he's held a major demolition event in his driveway, and for those of you who can do math, you may be able to guess the precipitating incident to this little ritual)
Additionally, I live in Colorado, a state marginally less prone to spontaneous and catastrophic conflagrations than a rotting grain silo, but only marginally.
Our recreational explosives laws are written accordingly.
I am in fact calling the Non Emergency line to report Fireworks violations, and reading off the brand labels to someone named Dorothy, who is gleefully totaling up a SPECTACULAR fine for my oblivious neighbor.
However, while I'm on the phone with Dorothy, I notice the wind begin to pick up.
and by "Notice" I mean "The Industrial Saran Wrap he left on his Lawn earlier is suddenly swept up about 100 feet into the air by an updraft intense enough to make my ears pop"
And by "Pick Up" I mean "I look up to see the sky has turned a fun and exciting shade of glass green, and the bottoms of the clouds are bumpy and rounded, and the overall effect is not unlike looking up through the bottom of the cup at God's Matcha Boba Tea."
For those of you who do not live in places with Inclement Weather, these conditions mean "You have about 30 seconds before a Major Meteorological Event Occurs."
I move under the eaves.
"Hang on Dorothy." I say, nose filling with Petrichor. "The show is about to be cancelled."
"Oh, that doesn't matter!" Dorothy cheerfully informs me. "It's illegal for him just to possess those, no matter if he actually gets to set them off or not."
"Terrific, because he's gotten maybe five boxes out of a hundred inside."
Sometimes,
the weather gods are Merciful and give you a verbal warning, typically in the kind of thunderclap that makes your ears ring.
The Gods were not merciful today.
It's not often that I am in the time, place, correct angle or in a properly observational frame of mind to see this,
But I got to see it today.
Huh. I thought. I've never seen a cloud just DIVE for the ground before.
Oh. I realized as it got closer.
That's RAIN.
Sometimes, a thunderstorm will form in such a way that the rain that would normally be distributed over an area of say,
five to tent square miles,
is instead concentrated into an area of say,
my neighborhood exactly.
So today, I was granted the rare privilege of being able to actually see the literal wall of water descend from On High and DIRECTLY onto my porch, my street, and my neighbor's truck, and his pile of unwrapped fireworks.
The sheer impact force of the downpour immediately scatters the teetering pile of fireworks boxes in the back of the truck, like the wrath of God striking down the tower of Babel.
Boxes tumble, then are washed out of the bed of the truck by the deluge.
Smaller Boxes are carried down the road in a little line by the stream forming in the gutter, like little impotent explosive ducklings.
My neighbor was definitely yelling something, but I could not hear what over the DEAFENING noise several million gallons of water makes upon high-speed contact with the earth's surface, but there was a lot of arm-waving and faces turning red as he went looking for the saran wrap that had probably blown to Nebraska by now, while his wife started disassembling the complex three-dimensional puzzle of interlocking material goods in search of a tarp.
They do not have a tarp.
They have one of those wretched Thin Blue Line flags though, and my neighbor jogs out in a futile effort to cover what's left in the truck.
Which is when the hail begins.
"HELLO?" Yelled Dorothy.
"HI!" I shouted. "WE'RE HAVING SOME WEATHER!"
"OH GOOD!" she shouts back. "WE NEED THE MOISTURE!"
I watch for a minute longer, but the loss was immediate and catastrophic- the hail is the size of marbles and dense and cares not for your pitiful cardboard and cellophane, ripping the boxes asunder and punching holes in the few things covered in plastic.
The colors on the Thin Blue Line Flag are seeping all over the remains of that it was supposed to protect in a particularly apt visual metaphor.
Not even the few boxes that made it into the garage are spared, as the German Shepherd escapes from indoors, and in an attempt to assist her humans, jumps directly into the small stack of not-yet-ruined boxes, scattering them into the driveway and deluge. She even picks one up so her humans will chase her around the yard, before dropping it in the gutter to be swept away.
So.
I was raised Agnostic
-but even I can recognize when God slaps someone upside the head and shouts "NO!" at them.
---
(If you laughed, please consider supporting my Ko-fi or preordering my book of Strange Stories on Patreon)
"How Trump Hijacked America's 250th Birthday" (possibly committing "wire fraud" along the way)
REP. JARED HUFFMAN (July 2, 2026): "America's 250th birthday is being run by a shadow company.... Freedom 250 has raised millions of dollars. It's selling access to the president. And it won't tell you who's paying or where the money goes. This is how Trump hijacked America's birthday." [color emphasis added]
It is worth the time to watch this video. The corruption involved in Trump's Freedom 250 organization is outrageous.
Below are some GIFs & highlights from the video [color/emphasis added]:
When Trump couldn't "hijack" the bipartisan America 250 Commission, Trump formed Freedom 250, an LLC "shell company" that was placed inside the National Park Foundation charity; consequently, donors' names can remain hidden.
Trump also diverted funds to Freedom 250 that were allocated for America 250.
"Congress had set aside $150 million to celebrate our 250th. The America 250 Commission was promised $100 million of that funding, but in November of 2025, the White House told the America 250 chairwoman she would only get 50 million. And in the months that followed, they whittled it down to just 25 million. The rest of the money was taken by Freedom 250."
Then: "Freedom 250 went after the real Commission's corporate sponsors. Not just donations, but a quid pro quo of access to Trump in exchange for cash. Lockheed Martin, Exxon Mobile, Chevron, Mastercard, United Airlines, United Health."
"Fundraisers misled donors who intended to support the America 250 Commission by giving them Freedom 250's banking information. And through this bait and switch, contributions meant for the nonpartisan Birthday Foundation were routed to Trump's Shadow Corporation instead. This is potential wire fraud."
Meanwhile, National Park employees were ordered to remove "factual signs about slavery, climate change, and the forced removal of Native Americans" and replace them with signs that conveyed a whitewashed, “distorted version of history.”
"They paid out 10 million taxpayer dollars for a fleet of trucks, running PragerU videos"...
..."and an AI generated George Washington that tells school kids that their rights are a gift from God. something the real Washington never said. They're parading these proselytizing propaganda trucks in front of schools on your dime."
[See more under the cut.]
"They've turned what should be a non-political unifying celebration of America's 250th into a right-wing Christian battering ram aimed at breaking down what Thomas Jefferson called the wall of separation between church and state enshrining their extreme version of Christianity as our de facto national religion."
"This agenda is not subtle. It fuses white Christian supremacist identity with history revisionism, insisting the nation's founding, its laws, and our fundamental rights are rooted in the Christian Bible rather than the revolutionary principle of self-government [….] It's about promoting two things: Christian nationalism and Donald Trump."
"We laid out in meticulous detail how it happened, not to tell you what to think about America's 250th anniversary, but so you'd know what they've done in our name. so that you have the facts to decide for yourself whether it's acceptable."
"250 years ago, our founders made a statement that America belongs to the people, not to powerful tyrants. We think America still belongs to all of us, to you, and we will fight to keep it that way."
A copy of the report can be found HERE.
____________
In addition to all of the above, the video also claims that:
Trump was "trading" & promoting corporate sponsors' stocks.
Freedom 250 fundraisers were soliciting money from “foreign governments” & asking, “how they wanted to shape America’s birthday.”
Personal data was being "harvested" from Americans who signed up for any Freedom 250 event.
"An internal playbook called for scripture readings and worship nights on the National Mall."
"They pedaled sponsorship packages and photo ops with Trump at 10 million bucks a pop."
The UFC ring on the White House's lawn was a part of this, even though it was for Trump's "80th birthday, with seats that ran a million a half dollars."
Contracts were given to "Trump's closest allies, including Event Strategies, Inc., one of the masterminds [behind] the rallies surrounding the January 6th insurrection."
The House Republicans did not support the investigation of Freedom 250. Instead, "they blocked [the Democrats'] requests, shielded the individuals and entities involved, and refused to hold a single hearing on any of this."
Finally, Rep. Huffman claims: "This is bigger than one anniversary. The political and legal machinations that brought us to this point are a potential blueprint for others who seek to betray the public trust, take something the public loves, run dark money through it, sell access, and make sure the details are hidden from public scrutiny."
Note. The subtitles [with minor editing]for the GIFs were generated by Kapwing AI. The partial video transcript [with minor editing] was auto-generated by YouTube.
[images: series of tweets from @realavocadofact. tweets read, “they’re not elite they’re rich”, “they’re not better they’re better supplied”, “they’re not smarter or faster they’re buying up others’ lifetimes to do their chores”, “there is nothing wrong with you; you’re doing your best in a game rigged against you, probably not enough people and fruit tell you that”]
I see this reaction a lot, and I gotta say, it always makes me a little sad. Whenever the conversation of exploitation of labor comes up, inevitably someone finds themselves struggling with the guilt of “It is so important to me not to contribute to exploitation but I cannot do this thing myself and need someone else to do it for me, so how do I even approach that?”
Exploitation isn’t in the hiring of a service worker. Exploitation is in the respect you show them for their ability to perform the service you need from them.
I have been on a cleaning service staff before, and also been someone who hired a cleaning service, and I can tell you for sure that a lot of cleaning crews (especially worker owned ones) absolutely LOVE their clients and are genuinely happy to be able to make their lives better. The clients they don’t like? Those are the ones who disrespect the workers.
When I was involved with a cleaning service, we had everything from little old ladies living alone to McMasions with five cars as clients, and I can assure you that whenever there was someone who clearly hired us because they were overwhelmed or unable to keep their space clean, those were the households where you put a little more elbow grease in and did a deep clean even when it wasn’t paid for, because you could see how much these people were trying and struggling, and they were always so kind and generous and often embarrassed when talking to you about the job.
I only hired a service a couple if times in my life, but whenever I did, I worked with the same people as often as I could, tipped as well as I could afford, and tried to be the kind of client I would want to have, and that’s how I often ended up with my baseboards cleaned too, or my fridge scrubbed and organized or a restorative clean done in a high use room even when that wasn’t what I had scheduled or paid for.
I’ve heard the same thing from all manner of service workers over the years. Many of us like our jobs! We enjoy the work. It’s the customers that can do a number on you.
I think a lot of people are afraid that by needing a service they are inherently exploiting or harming the people who perform that service, and they really aren’t. But it does benefit a capitalist system for us to all be burnt out and overwhelmed because we’re too afraid to hire the help we need. Be upfront and honest with service workers about what you need and why you need it, and treat them with dognity and kindness while they perform your service, and I promise you they will always be happy to answer your call.
how do I find joy and whimsy again when it feels like everything in my world as well as the literal world, is on fire?
I’ve answered this question before but I don’t mind asking it again. Because a lot of the world is on fire these days. And it sucks
Generally as a blanket statement, I have a few good close friends that I can reliably laugh and cry with each time I’m with them. A source of community is the greatest buffer against poor mental health. We were meant to be in community with each other; if we’re not, we hurt. So find your community! Laugh with your friends! Be comfortable enough to cry with them! It works wonders💕
Also, connecting with nature is a big thing for me personally. I don’t go on walks super often because it gets pretty hot where I live, but even just driving and noticing the birds and the trees really helps. If you can go on nature walks this might help, and even if you’re in a big city, walking around and taking time to notice the people and their lives may help too.
It’s so hard to have joy and whimsy these days but we must persist! Because a world without joy and whimsy is a world I don’t wanna live in🫧
Also noting that this line has a lot of clothing that works for people who need easy chest access or have limited upper body mobility, like if you are recovering from surgery or doing chemo
So, I was working in a lab, right? My job in the lab was preparing a pure, concentrated enough sample of virus. This is tricky since, y'know, viruses require hosts to replicate, but you then need to get the host cells (and the pieces of the host cells that died!) out of the sample while still keeping the viruses. Once I'd finished and the samples had been sent to the database for analysis as well as a second one sent to be frozen for future reference, there was still some left over that needed to be disposed of.
I, knowing that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, waited carefully for the lab director to be deep in conversation with someone else on the other side of the laboratory. And then I took my chance.
Test tubes, as it turns out, are really bad as shot glasses. Their shape turns any liquid inside into a stream, so you really can't knock it back quickly - it takes a couple seconds. Additionally, the best way I can describe the taste of virus concentrate was "sterile rot". A very unique kind of bad! Made worse by the test tube's inefficiency as a shot glass.
(by the way we were studying bacteriophages, not animal viruses. these viruses are too specialized on attacking prokaryotes to even recognize our cells as targets at all, according to studies.)
(but also like. if the viruses managed to successfully switch hosts and killed me with a violent infection, itd still be worth it.)
having thought about it this is a generationally anti-consumer announcement that will have a profoundly detrimental impact on consumers and retail markets. this will price out new consumers even more than a $600 PS5 and $80 games will. this will make games less accessible and more nickel-and-dimed. this will make games impossible to share irl without giving your console up, and will stop institutions like libraries from being able to loan copies of modern games. and most importantly, it will be for a minimal profit, as most of the sales in video games are already digital.
this is such a staggeringly catastrophic piece of news that i'm shocked it wasn't said by nintendo. congrats to sony for one-upping them in anti-consumer practices.
microslop is currently feuding with some nerd and it's the funniest thing ever
basically, some guy called nightmare-eclipse has found several zero-day exploits in windows and at first contacted microsoft about it but they kept ignoring him (even though they have a bug bounty program, so technically they have to pay him a grant for finding these)
so then he started posting them publicly whenever he found any in hopes of microsoft finally fixing them that way, but of course that leaves windows users vulnerable, because now not-so-nice hackers can see exactly how they can use those exploits. He has found FOUR so far and microsoft did nothing about it.
microsoft then deleted the guy's gitlab account and sued him, after which he said they should mark july 14th in their calender because he is done playing nice and is going to "shatter their bones"
Reasons for hope: Lots of amazing people did a ton of work to make this fantastic, fully interactive resource available - because no matter how bleak things seem, there are millions, and millions of people doing everything they can to protect both the world and their own communities.
You can use this to view and subscribe to updates, project statuses, and for at least some of them even whole dossiers. This is an amazing resource, I highly recommend checking it out
Hi I have an undergrad psych degree! I also have ADHD! In my motherfucking TEXTBOOK, the authors said, “Research describes ADHD as a neurodevelopmental disorder in the same vein as Autism. We are putting the (miniscule) section on ADHD in the same chapter as ODD, though, because we believe really these disorders both boil down to ✨️ people not doing what we tell them to because they are lazy✨️”
So my actual TEXTBOOK admitted that it was biased and teaching these disorders based on opinion and not up to date research. And, as described above, the section on ODD was basically just, “these are bad kids. We will not look into why or how or what comorbidities exist and we will also not be exploring the possibility of ODD really being a manifestation of trauma/undiagnosed adhd/autism/pathological demand avoidance/persistent drive for autonomy. We will however be mostly focusing on how annoying these kids are to their parents and teachers ✨️”
It’s fucking crazy. “Yeah we know lots of people with autism struggle to follow demands. They may either ignore/not register demands or have meltdowns when demands are placed. They may engage in physical aggression, verbal aggression, and property desctruction when directed to complete tasks or be exposed to uncomfortable sensory input. They may need to know the why behind demands and consequently argue with authority figures. They may be easily upset by sensory input or social interactions and have emotional outbursts when pushed beyond their limits. Some children with autism seek attention and may engage in maladaptive behaviors to elicit the attention of peers and caregivers if positive attention is not given freely/if they are ignored when behaving appropriately. All of these are symptoms of their underlying neurological differences and should be met with compassion and understanding. They are not bad children. Their brains process information differently and therefore they have executive functioning, sensory processing, and emotional regulation challenges that cause these behaviors.
Those kids over there? Yeah they have all the same symptoms but they are just Morally Wrong and Bad Children. They have Oppositional Defiance Disorder. How can I tell? Well that one hand flaps and that one doesn’t.”
Race and the Mental Representation of Individuals Diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder: Implications for Diagnosis
Results: Classification images (CIs) showed that the children selected as having ODD appeared more prototypically Black in facial appearance than children not chosen as having ODD. No differences emerged in the gendered appearance of the two group-level CIs. Judged rates of ODD were higher for the children who appeared to be Black. However, diagnostic judgments of clinical trainees and practitioners were unaffected by appearance factors, suggesting that formal clinical training might attenuate the influence of stereotypes on judgment.
Discussion: These results indicate that an overlap in Black stereotypes and diagnostic criteria for ODD might contribute to elevated diagnosis of ODD in African American children.
The burning question: When she has her hands on either side of her face, right at the start, is this the moment she realized, “I’m gonna have to marry this guy” ?
amandla
baratheonpilled
yousharknotpass
gummygunk
pixelskylines
gracieabrams
dailybridgerton
