almost always improvising

he/they, 30s / queerio, lads / canadian prairies

[penandinkprincess]

i do think that the funniest i've ever been was entirely on accident one christmas when i was little. i'm a lifelong animal lover and left out carrots and water for the reindeer each year because they were doing the real work, and my poor parents tried to make a magical memory for me and left one carrot on the plate with a bite out of it as if the reindeer had left it.

unfortunately little me had the reasoning skills of a little sherlock and surmised based on my experience with horses that the teeth marks were WAY too small to have been from a reindeer and HAD to have been from a human.

which led to baby pen being PISSED at santa's greedy ass for getting at the carrots that were NOT for him.

the entire christmas morning was derailed because of my fury at santa claus. we didn't even open presents immediately because i had to write a letter IMMEDIATELY to let him know those carrots were NOT for him and it was NOT NICE to not share with the reindeer especially when EVERYONE was leaving cookies for him and-

needless to say, my parents did not EVER try to manufacture christmas magic again for fear of setting off a tiny reindeer union leader.

[creatingblackcharacters]

‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️ trust me, if white people know you aren't safe to be racist around, we'll notice! Your ACTIONS will speak for you!

[patrochillesvibes]

[dovesndecay]

we don't actually need gender markers on our licenses and whatnot. we could just. do away with those entirely. i do not believe this would lead disaster.

[abouquetofdaylillies-deactivate]

Pre-menstrual depression is always depicted as like "He He! I had a box of icecream bars and cried while watching the Titanic!" But in reality, it's more like, "I'm standing the edge of an abyss. There is nothing good inside of me, I'm filled with rage and desperation."

It's crazy that being told how to deal with that is never a part of anyone's menstrual sex education.

[headspace-hotel]

This has already been said in the notes, but if PMS causes extreme depression and even suicidal ideation, that is in fact something that most people do not experience and it can be treated

Like for the majority it really is "oh i'm hungrier and moodier than usual"

^this should be a part of sex education so the point still stands

[godesssiri]

I went to my doctor after I was walking to work one morning and saw a bus coming and actually took a step to throw myself in front of it before I pulled myself together. Later that day I started bleeding and was literally like someone flipped a switch and I didn't feel suicidal anymore. Which made me feel like I was loosing my mind because who goes from 'I want to throw myself in front of a bus' to 'I'm perfectly fine' just like that? I did some research, I went to the doctor and described my feelings, he looked me in the eye and gently asked what I thought it was, I said I'd read about PMDD and I thought it might be that, he said 'I think so too' and wrote a prescription.

If, before you get your period, you feel furiously angry, suicidal, irritated by every tiny thing to the point you want to murder someone, stuck in a black hole you'll never escape from. If you are experiencing extreme emotions for what seems like no good reason, especially if you get your period and those extreme emotions just go away. You're probably not just PMSing , you may have PMS's feral big sister PMDD and it's treatable.

Also this is something that can develop as you get older. So if you used to get normal PMS but what I wrote above sounds more like your norm now then don't just write it off as regular PMS.

[manourfi]

Being a crafty person and making a bunch of things often prompts people to ask "oh wow did you make that?" And like, the short answer is: yes I did, but the long answer is: well, no, the pattern isn't mine, but I did choose and buy the fabric/yarn and sewed it together/crocheted it/knitted it myself. I used a reference for that drawing/painting, I didn't come up with it myself. That ceramic piece was insired by a poem and a painting made by different people. What I'm trying to say is, everything I make requires other people to make their own thing first, and then I get inspired by them to do my own thing. So I can't really call anything truly mine, because really it's just a bunch of inspirations and experiences of others (and me) put together by my hands. Does that answer your question

[anarchistmemedistro]

[mini-wrants]

Outdoor in sun perfec t place for president to do speech! Outdoor very warm very soft put old man on green lawn under sun. Put old man in warm sun. no problem ever in warm sun because good view and audience can see long speech. Nice podium outdoor sunny perfect place for old president can trust warm sun to give nice view to President good luck to President. friend sun.

[dinomoder]

This is the best ad for Project Hail Mary I have ever seen. Like if I was on the fence about watching or reading it, this would convince me to do so.

[sholiofic]

Another Murderbot prompt: while running from CR bullshit, Gurathin's augments - all of them - are temporarily out of commission and he has to rely on Murderbot to get him to safety while he's terribly out of it. <3

I felt it happen, but didn't realize at first what it was or how much of a problem it was going to be. The feed blipped out, then came back. My firewalls were fine. I lost my drones for an instant, but restored the connection before they could do more than bounce off the wall.

Beside me, Gurathin stumbled and caught himself heavily on the wall.

I should have known our escape was going too well.

What's wrong? I asked him in the feed. When he didn't respond, I repeated it out loud.

"Didn't you feel that?" He coughed a little. "Augment kill. I guess it wouldn't affect you."

I didn't like the word "kill" in there. I hadn't actually realized that was a thing. "Are your augments offline?"

"Couldn't you tell?"

I guess his voice wasn't augmented. Unfortunately.

But when he hesitated to take a step forward, I realized we had a problem. A big one. Like most humans who were augmented on his level, Gurathin's augments ran data to and from his visual cortex. That was a pretty common way of doing it, because humans liked to "see" things, and running data to the visual cortex was a common way of displaying it. Iris had that, too. However, this meant that his augments were handling the input from his eyes. It was why I was able to tap into the flow of date from his eyes like a camera, when he let me, and why I'd been able to cut it off when we were hardwired that one time.

And now something -- StationSec, probably -- had just done that for him.

Meanwhile I was in the system feed for the CR station we were currently trying to escape from, pulling all the data I could from StationSys. They wouldn't just do that for no reason. There was no station-wide alert, but I could feel busy little hives of activity in StationSec, which I hadn't bothered hacking into before because I was handling it from the hub end -- no need to hack security if security never knew there was a threat.

Apparently they now knew there was a threat. I threw a couple of processes toward getting into their systems, and started another one searching for increased security presence -- oh yeah, there were extra guards on the docks. Wonderful. It was pretty clear from the lack of a high alert that they didn't know exactly what was going on, but they'd definitely figured out something was.

Gurathin was still standing there, looking blank. I guess I would too, if someone cut my visuals. I wondered what else he'd lost and how much this was going to slow us down. I couldn't feel him at all, which was weird, and without hardwiring, which we couldn't stop for, there was nothing I could do to help. The system wasn't actively blocking him. It had simply caused him to go offline. I couldn't imagine how horrible that would feel for me, but Gurathin was a lot more organic than I was. This had never really seemed like a benefit to me before.

I grabbed his arm, the way I was used to moving my humans around when they were being slow and I needed to. I'd done it with him plenty of times. But he jumped. Of course, he didn't know I was going to do that because he couldn't see me. Stupid Murderbot. Stupid Gurathin too, for letting this happen to him.

"I can't see," he said unnecessarily. His arm had gone still in my grasp.

"I know. That's why I'm touching you. I wouldn't be doing it otherwise," I said, already pulling him into motion. That made him smile, but he stumbled a little, almost walking into me. That wasn't normal. Humans relied on their sight to orient themselves in space, I knew that because some aspects of my own processing were similar, but he shouldn't be that disoriented. "I'll take you where you need to go. Tell me what's offline. The important functions, the ones that matter." Deity knew what random augments he had. I certainly didn't want to hear about it in any more detail than I had to.

"Well, uh, visual processing, obviously," he began as I guided him down the hall as swiftly as I could get him to move, meanwhile spreading out my drones into a wider perimeter. I dropped the dock inputs for now; we wouldn't be there for a little while, so it didn't matter yet, and I needed to get that processing power back if I was going to get into StationSec properly.

"What else?" I asked, because he had paused to navigate the floor.

"Uh, some of my proprioception is handled through my augments." He was still unstable, legs trying to tangle up, which bothered me in a way I wasn't going to think about. He brought his own hand around to grip the hand I had on his arm, putting his hand over mine, then realized he was doing and jerked it away. I could tell he was looking for additional stability.

"You can do that," I said. "Just let go if I do." He nodded, and although I didn't want to admit I didn't know, I asked anyway because I figured that I needed to know for mission purposes. "What's proprioception?" Stupid shitty language models.

"My awareness of myself in space. Balance, stuff like that."

"Why in the world would you have augments for that?"

"It helps with coordination and speed. Not getting sick in zero gee. That kind of thing."

"Humans," I muttered. I hadn't noticed Gurathin being any more coordinated than your average human, and considerably less so than some. Maybe he'd been really terrible at it before. "What else?"

"There's also one that's -- that is, was supporting some of the nerve functions in my knee from that thing on the survey planet." With all of his other wobbling around, I hadn't noticed, but it was true that he was moving his legs a little oddly. He hesitated briefly, then said, "Those are the only ones that matter to us now."

My drones alerted me to a security patrol up ahead, so I had to guide us a different way to the lift network than I was planning to go. "What else?" I asked. "From the way you said that, there are other ones."

"You said you only need to know about the ones that matter."

"Okay, for the sake of information, just tell me what else there is."

I couldn't understand his hesitation until he started talking again. "Liver and kidneys. Those are down right now."

I couldn't remember off the top of my head what human livers and kidneys did, but I was pretty sure they were necessary. "Is it normal to have augments for that?"

"No, SecUnit," he said impatiently. "We'll talk about it later."

I added a brand new process, which was pulling information off the station feed on human organ function. I hoped it wasn't too gross. "How long until that becomes a problem?" 

After a pause which was probably not as long for him as it felt like for me, he said,  "Longer than it'll take us to get to a transport, and if we aren't there by then, it won't be our biggest problem."

I put a priority flag on that download.

[covid-safer-hotties]

[knitmeapony]

Over 96% Of Airplane Flights Had Covid-19 Coronavirus In Their Wastewater

The wastewater from 28 of 29 airline flights in in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, collected from June to December 31 of last year contained the sev

I am guessing this is the study! It's a single airline but we're talking inbound flights, too. Not repeated since 2023, or at least no additional data has been published. I still agree 'mask on every flight', especially on high-traffic weekends and during things like flu season, but worth taking a peek at the data.

[soft-galaxies]

rewatched the first two mb eps and was struck by a few more gurathin observations:

being depicted as an outsider from the rest of the presaux team when they were meeting w/ the Company (sourpuss glare and hunched posture, didn't get up to join the consensus ritual until ratthi prompted him, clashing aesthetics in his meeting outfit: hoodie underneath a tightly fitting rainbow-knit sweatervest underneath a dull brown blazer far more formal than what anyone else is wearing but is still in between the colorful hippie preservation garb and the more monochromatic rim tech-athleisure)

trying to get secunit to admit to being rogue in ep 2 by going through a rhetorical process of elimination to figure out why mb is behaving unlike a regular secunit (what other constructs would try to comfort a client -> comfortunit -> but secunit wasn't built to be a comfortunit -> so it's not behaving normally for a secunit -> normal secunit would have to maintain eye contact if ordered -> this one is following orders but clearly doesn't want to -> properly functioning governor modules would override a personal want -> so the governor module isn't functioning properly -> nothing's stopping it from being dangerous to us = RISK)

once he starts confirming more of his suspicions, he verbally tries to be threatening without having the substance to back up his threats except for reciting a systemic power outside of his control, which he also despises but is leveraging b/c that's the only thing he has to leverage

begins ep 2 by bringing up that he has had weapons training as a reason for him to go with mensah instead of bringing secunit (even though he's never shown w/ a weapon in the show unless it's wielded by someone else aiming at him)

clenches his fists repeatedly at the beginning of ep 2: when he's anticipating harm, when he's frustrated at the team not listening to him (even after he had to shut his eyes when they reassured him they loved him b/c he was starting to lose it thinking about the Company and they knew his history with them)

[aurpiment]

“It’s easy to assume”: someone’s misconception is about to be amiably corrected

“It’s tempting to assume”: someone’s assumption is about to be criticized

“It’s comforting to assume”: someone’s assumption is going to be read for filth

[creekfiend]

I think a lot of this 'religion is necessarily oppressive' stuff honestly is kind of like the confusion about ppl thinking that like, slavery and scientific racism and etc came about BECAUSE OF beliefs that Black people etc were not fully human rather than those beliefs -- those ARGUMENTS, really -- being JUSTIFICATIONS that were invented to allow white ppl to continue to engage in slavery which was at its core about economic exploitation. Like that most systemic bigotry serves a Useful Purpose to those in power and that's why it exists; the policies aren't put in place because of the beliefs. The cart isn't pulling the horse. Christian stuff was used to justify the same things that later, "scientific progress" was used to justify in the west (e.g. scientific racism, eugenics, etc. Very very very much rooted in the idea of certain beliefs and cultures as inherently more rational and forward thinking because BEING RATIONAL AND VALUING SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS WERE CULTURAL VALUES AT THE TIME.) (This does not say anything about Science. It says things about Institutes and power and oppression.)

Similarly, you see a lot of people saying "well religion is used to justify oppression by the people in power" and its like yes. Religion is not unique. Beliefs about what is true about the world -- ideology -- can always be used to do this and frequently is.

When there are common beliefs held by a majority of people in a given culture those beliefs will be used by the people in power to explain and justify the things they do to maintain power and control in society.

This isn't a function of religion. It's a function of power.

When people say "well, this religious rhetoric is/was used to justify misogynistic legal standards in this society" the answer is yep. And if it wasn't that it would be something else because that society had an investment in that specific kind of oppression of women. We have seen this morph into 'rational' 'scientific' explanations for women's inferiority and justifications for making women second class citizens once the cultural values swing more towards rationality and science, as well. Thats... regular.

Like... love to have a good faith convo about this with someone who doesn't get weird and reactionary about "Religious People" but sure not seeing much of that going on. Weirdly.

Anyway.

[chamerionwrites]

#i think this can be a tough pill to swallow bc it necessarily involves#accepting that your secular ideology and philosophy can be exploited just as easily for violence and harm#as religious ideology can#because thats humans babey#fascinating also to me is the phenomenon of people believing that bc they do not subscribe to any beliefs that they see as#''religious'' or ''spiritual'' they are immune to magical thinking of any sort.#i promise you that is not true in the slightest.#and also the things that we each identify as SILLY AND OBVIOUSLY UNTRUE FAIRY TALE SHIT is... culturally determined hee hee#im sorry to tell u that no one is objective about reality. thats rough buddy!

[itseasytoremember]

So this one time I was in a hospital recovering from an emergency surgery on my leg, and had to be there long enough that they had to change my bedding, so, doped up on three kinds of pain meds and antibiotics my dad wheels me into the hallway while the nurses work.

"dad" I say, my eyes barely open "it's Colonel Sanders" while pointing down the hallway. He looks, and at the end of the hallway, there's a portrait of an old man, the donor who paid for the wing of the hospital I'm recovering in.

My dad explains as much to me, and goes "I mean the guy *kinda* looks like him, but why would Colonel Sanders pay for a hospital wing Mississauga Ontario? I think those drugs might me messing with you"

Then the nurse comes out of the room. I go "hey, who is that picture of?"

She looks at the portrait. She looks at me. She looks at my dad. She looks at the painting. She looks at me again.

"you don't recognize the Colonel??"

[txttletale]

I'm asking this genuinely, as a 19 yo with no education in economics and a pretty surface level understanding of socialism: can you explain the whole Bananas discourse in a way someone like me might understand? In my understanding it's just "This is just a product we can give up to create better worker conditions and that's fine" but apparently that's not the full picture?

alright so some pretty important background to all this is that we're all talking about the fact that bananas, grown in the global south, are available year-round at extremely low prices all around europe and the USA. it's not really about bananas per so--the banana in this discourse is a synechdoche for all the economic benefits of imperialism.

so how are cheap bananas a result of imperialism? first of all i want to tackle a common and v. silly counterargument: 'oh, these ridiculous communists think it's imperialist for produce to be shipped internationally'. nah. believing that this is the communist objection requires believing in a deeply naive view of international traide. this view goes something like 'well, if honduras has lots of bananas, and people in the usa want bananas and are willing to pay for them, surely everyone wins when the usa buys bananas!'.

there are of course two key errors here and they are both packed into 'honduras has lots of bananas'. for a start, although the bananas are grown in honduras, honduras doesn't really 'have' them, because the plantations are mostly owned by chiquita (formerly known as united fruit) dole, del monte, and other multinationals--when they're not, those multinationals will usually purchase the bananas from honduran growers and conduct the export themselves. and wouldn't you know it, it's those intervening middleman steps--export, import, and retail, where the vast majority of money is made off bananas! so in the process of a banana making its way from honduras to a 7/11, usamerican multinationals make money selling the bananas to usamerican importers who make money selling them to usamerican retailers who make money selling them to usamerican customers.

when chiquita sells a banana to be sold in walmart, a magic trick is being performed: a banana is disappearing from honduras, and yet somehow an american company is paying a second american company for it! this is economic imperialism, the usamerican multinational extracting resources from a nation while simultaneously pocketing the value of those resources.

why does the honduran government allow this? if selling bananas is such a bad deal for the nation, why do they continue to export millions of dollars of banans a year? well, obviously, there's the fact that if they didn't, they would face a coup. the united states is more than willing to intervene and cause mass death and war to protect the profits of its multinationals. but the second, more subtle thing keeping honduras bound to this ridiculously unbalanced relationship is the need for dollars. because the US dollar is the global reserve currency, and the de facto currency of international trade, exporting to the USA is a basic necessity for nations like honduras, guatemala, &c. why is the dollar the global reserve currency? because of usamerican military and economic hegemony, of course. imperialism built upon imperialism!

this is unequal exchange, the neoimperialist terms of international trade that make the 'global economy' a tool of siphoning value and resources from the global south to the imperial core. & this is the second flaw to unravel in 'honduras has a lot of bananas' -- honduras only 'has a lot of bananas' because this global economic hegemony has led to vast unsustainable monoculture banana plantations to dominate the agriculture of honduras. it's long-attested how monoculture growth is unsustainable because it destroys soil and leads to easily-wiped-out-by-infection plants.

so, bananas in the USA are cheap because:

the workers that grow them are barely paid, mistreated, prevented from unionizing, and sometimes murdered

the nations in which the bananas are grown accept brutally unfair trade and tariff terms with the USA because they desperately need a supply of US dollars and so have little position to negotiate

shipping is also much cheaper than it should be because sailors are chronically underpaid and often not paid at all or forced to pay to work (!)

bananas are cheap, in conclusion, because they're produced by underpaid and brutalized workers and then imported on extortionate and unfair terms.

so what, should we all give up bananas? no, and it's a sign of total lack of understanding of socialism as a global movement that all the pearl-clutching usamericans have latched onto the scary communists telling them to stop buying bananas. communism does not care about you as a consumer. individual consumptive choices are not a meaningful arena of political action. the socialist position is not "if there was a socialist reovlution in the usa, we would all stop eating bananas like good little boys", but rather, "if there's a socialist revolution in the countries where bananas are grown, then the availability of bananas in the usa is going to drop, and if you want to be an anti-imperialist in the imperial core you have to accept that".

(this is where the second argument i see about this, 'oh what are you catholic you want me to eat dirt like a monk?' reveals itself as a silly fucking solipsistic misunderstanding)

and again, let's note that the case of the banana can very easily be generalised out to coffee, chocolate, sugar, etc, and that it's not about individual consumptive habits, but about global economic systems. if you are donkey fucking kong and you eat 100 bananas a day i don't care and neither does anyone else. it's about trying to illustrate just one tiny mundane way in which economic imperialism makes the lives of people in the global north more convenient and simpler and so of course there is enormous pushback from people who attach moral value to this and therefore feel like the mean commies are personally calling them evil for eating a nutella or whatever which is frankly pretty tiring. Sad!

tldr: it is not imperialism when produce go on boat but it is imperialism when produce grown for dirt cheap by underpaid workers in a country with a devalued currency is then bought and exported and sold by usamerican companies creating huge amounts of economic value of which the nation in which the banana was grown, let alone the people who actually fucking grew it, don't see a cent -- and this is the engine behind the cheap, available-every-day-all-year-everywhere presence of bananas in the usa (and other places!)

[theweirdwideweb]

A millennial 9/11 coded experience for Gen Z is going to be 8 years from now meeting an adult that doesn't remember covid.

[thegreatgoatby]

some more jax abstraction hair expressions