I'm tired

[werewolf-transgenderism]

irritating as fuck when people get mad at Black people existing in premodern historical fiction/fantasy media. like first of all, you're racist. and second of all, you are acting as though Black people didn't exist in premodern Europe which is simply false. especially when we're talking about the Mediterranean, like what the fuck do you people think is along the southern half of the Mediterranean Ocean?? everyone's on boats, there are GOING to be interactions with Black people in Northern Africa, and there are GOING to be Black people in Mediterranean Europe. stop being stupid. your imagined homogeneous white European past is not historical reality, get over it you massive losers

[homunculus-argument]

Imagine if you met someone who can't eat watermelon. Not that they're allergic or unable somehow, but they just haven't figured out how to do that. So you're like "what the hell do you mean? it works just like eating anything else, you open your mouth, sink your teeth in, take a bite and chew. If you can bite, chew and swallow, you should be able to eat a watermelon."

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

If someone can't do something after being repeatedly told to "just do it", there might be some key component missing that one side has no idea about, and the other side assumed was so obvious it goes without mention.

[therainstheyaredropping]

Yep.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. [...]

I think my revised belief is that if you are stuck at how to get better at something, spend a little while assuming there’s just some trick to it you’ve missed. You can try to generate the trick yourself, but it’s probably easier to learn it by observing someone else being good at the thing, asking them some questions, and seeing if you have any lightbulb moment.

[hergan416]

My fiance played the clarinet when he was in school. When he was first learning to play, he rented an instrument from the school to learn on. He was the last chair clarinet, had been for years, because he could not make notes that required the register key. For years, they kept making him do embrature exercises and he started to get a few notes, with lots of effort. Eventually he had to get private lessons to stay in band.

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.

Sometimes you don't need to brute force a problem. Sometimes your clarinet is just broken.

[nowordsandnotune]

Not quite sure why the clarinet addition got me crying, but here you go people: just in case, let's get you some new pads.

[beardedmrbean]

Congratulations on the cat

[depsidase]

[gutsncaska]

It's also really important to note that the USA "leftists" are really only slightly left of center when you look at global politics. Our Far Right is just so extreme that they skew the entire graph. Our "Centrists" are actually Right Wing, they just seem Centered when so many others are sprinting towards Fascism.

[odinsblog]

[chilewithcarnage]

this is the second case ive seen of a black child going missing and then found lynched, what the fuck is going on

[glamygdala]

Her name is Juliana Nzita.

[d1anna]

Donate in MEMORY OF JULIANA NZITA, organized by Bueia Umba

Hi, my name is Bueia Umba and I am fundraising for Juliana Nzita. It is with deep sorrow… Bueia Umba necesita tu apoyo para Donate in MEMOR

her family’s gofundme!!

[loveridden1999]

constantly trying to see the inherent good in people is a humiliation ritual that i continue to willingly participate in

[ruffboi-mags]

[feminist-space]

[feminist-space]

[netscapenavigator-official]

You should be starting a recipe book. I don't give a shit if you're only 20-years-old. The modern web is rotting away bit by bit before our very eyes. You have no idea when that indie mom blog is going down or when Pinterest will remove that recipe. Copy it down in a notebook, physically or digitally. Save it somewhere only you can remove it. Trust me, looking for a recipe only to find out it's been wiped off the internet is so fucking sad. I've learned my lesson one too many times.

[mysharona1987]

They semi-cancelled Timothee Chalamet for simply saying he found opera and ballet boring, by the way.

How does Hollywood work these days?

Being a bit of a naive, foolish young man and (wrongfully) calling opera and ballet irrelevant?

“You must apologise immediately! No Oscar for you.”

Acknowledging you stole terrified teenage girls from their bedrooms?

“Eh, you get a pass.”

[mysharona1987]

Kidnapping teenage girls seems kind of worse than being stupid and uncultured, in the grand scheme of things.

[mysharona1987]

Tbf, if Timothee randomly showed up and tried to kidnap me from my bedroom, I am pretty sure I could punch him out.

He is very slim.

[warmfuzzybutch-deactivated20210]

[patron-saints]

[Image text: two tweets from orville perker @ literate_coyote. the first says “stone butch blues does not end with jess figuring out where exactly they fit between “butch lesbian” and “trans masc” but ends with them becoming a communist. organized labor and revolutionary politics is what saved them, not figuring out a specific identity. this is important.”

The second tweet says, “the book isn’t really about figuring out where you fit in this huge spectrum of labels (esp micro identities) but to find solidarity with workers like yourself, to organize along lines of shared needs like workplace safety or healthcare, because that’s how we get liberation.” End Text.]

[portraitofhealing]

Does anyone know where I can find this text because????? Holy hell that’s not happening

[warmfuzzybutch-deactivated20210]

This book is free in PDF form and you can by a print copy at cost at https://www.lesliefeinberg.net/

https://www.lesliefeinberg.net/

[queeranarchism]

Leslie Feinberg worked up to a few days before hir death to make sure hir groundbreaking book was available to all, for free. Never ever pay a dirtbag who charges a fortune for some rare old copy. Download this book for free or buy a print copy for dirt cheap. It’s what Leslie wants.

[thetrekkiehasthephonebox]

I guess I just can't find it in myself to care all that much about the annual summertime leg shaving discourse this year. We've got bigger fish to fry, you know?

[thetrekkiehasthephonebox]

Can we start talking about reproductive rights again? Or the wage gap? Remember when we used to talk about the wage gap on this website? Menstrual supply costs and availability? Pink tax? Glass ceiling? Glass cliff? Literally anything else besides leg hair?

[spicycheeser]

"A marriage ending isn't a failure at all. I spent eleven years with her. We were so in love that we couldn't image life apart from each other. We got our own place, adopted a dog, and supported each other through school. I thought if tow people loved each other enough the rest would fall into place, except... love isn't everything.

And I didn't want to believe that, but we were sitting in counseling one day, talking about our future and I realized we were describing two completely different lives. Where we'd live, what kind of life we wanted, what made us happy. And it hit me that- I love this woman and this woman loved me. And after eleven years of loss, grief, career changes, we were so deeply in love... but we weren't aligned. And I kept thinking 'We just need to try harder. We can find some compromise to make this work,' because that's what you're supposed to do when you love someone, right?

But the reality was, we had just become different people. Her trade school took her in one direction, my graduate degree in another and trying to force us back into who we were five years ago wasn't coming from a place of love. It was coming from a place of fear. Fear that, if this ended, it meant we wasted eleven years. But sitting there across from her, I realized: That's not how love works.

Those eleven years happened. They were real. The dog, our home, showing up for each other through grad school and trade school. I wouldn't change a single thing because loving someone doesn't mean you're meant to stay with them forever. And letting go doesn't erase what you had. We measure marriage by whether it lasts forever or not, but what if we measured it by whether it mattered?

What if we measured it by the love we gave, the life we built, and the people we became? Because love's job isn't to last forever, it's to help you become fully completely yourself, and sometimes the most loving thing you can do is give each other permission to be yourselves, separately. But the dog doesn't know were' divorced. He just gets two Christmases now."

Pulled this from this guy Preston Rakovsky's Instagram (@prestonrack) because it is a beautiful perspective on love, marriage, and relationships in general.

[liberalsarecool]

The solution to homelessness is housing.

[filmphotofranz]

[kaban-bang]

[sacred-portal]

[cargopantsman]

[nojamnojelly]

[demilypyro]

vampires are so full of shit. "oh the human race is beneath us, you're just livestock to us" I don't think you know what livestock is. do you feed us? care for us? protect us from predators? no. you just slink around dark alleys and ambush people. that's not what a higher being does. that's a bottom feeder. a parasite. karate punches your head off

[septembersung]

[janusfnc14]

She Would Say That. She would DO that.

[saywhat-politics]

The Trump admin paid a French company $1 billion to not build offshore wind farms. Blue states are suing | CNN

A coalition of seven blue states sued the Trump administration Tuesday after it paid a French company nearly $1 billion in taxpayer money to

A coalition of seven blue states sued the Trump administration Tuesday after it paid a French company nearly $1 billion in taxpayer money to not build offshore wind farms.

The lawsuit, led by New York attorney general Letitia James, argued that the deal struck between TotalEnergies and the Trump administration earlier this year deprived their states of much-needed power, and could raise electricity costs in the New England and mid-Atlantic regions.

In March, the Trump administration announced it would pay French energy giant TotalEnergies $928 million in taxpayer funds to reimburse the company for leases it had purchased under the Biden administration, allowing it to develop two offshore wind farms in waters near New York and North Carolina. The vast majority of that — $795 million — would have gone towards developing the New York project.