Many ideas, little motivation

she/they, personal blog mainly used for reblogging stuff I like, and drawings again once I get outta my funk.

[modern-politics111]

[notaplaceofhonour]

I know OP is presenting this as a historical example of “Defund the Police” working and being reasonable & doable actually, but when I see this story juxtaposed with the modern left’s attempts to decouple social services from the police, what I’m seeing is some of the reasons the left was successful at doing this kind of thing in the past and why it is failing to do so now.

Even just on the level of messaging, compare “Freedom House Ambulance Service” vs “Defund the Police”. One sounds like it’s about freedom, it’s about providing, it’s a service. The other frames itself as defunding, taking away infrastructure that—whether you personally agree or not—people broadly view as a service. There is nothing about “Defund the Police” or “ACAB” etc. (whose underlying critiques I broadly agree with) that intuitively suggests to anyone hearing it for the first time that what we’re suggesting is reallocating funds to empower and provide a better, safer, demilitarized kind of infrastructure. It’s just “get rid of this thing that most people feel like they need”.

We find THE most dystopian, tear-it-all-down, shockjock asshole-sounding ways to express a point & then spend so much time defending that choice & explaining “no no actually it’s really sensible” (often with an air of superiority, as if to say “you’re so stupid for thinking the dystopian-sounding thing i said isn’t actually dystopian”) that we never seem to get around to do the damn thing. rather than notice that we’re alienating our allies & learn from this, we just dig our heels in & refuse to adjust.

Why can’t we just say what we mean? Demilitarize the Police. Fund Welfare. Reallocate City Funds. Provide Social Services. If you don’t want to sound like you’re trying to strip apart societal infrastructure you don’t have to! If you’re trying to communicate that you’re trying to provide a service… you can just say that up front. We don’t have to marry ourselves to the **ABOLISH** ** DESTROY** **SMASH** **DEFUND** framing.

But it’s not just PR or tone or whatever.

FHAS also didn’t wait for permission or demand to get rid of the police-run ambulance first; they saw where the police-run ambulance was lacking and they filled the gap themselves. they they provided a solution. the only reason they got the trust & funding from the city government in the first place was by proving they could do it better.

also, as much as this story may illustrate an example of fixing the system from outside it, it still required cooperation with & working alongside the pre-existing system. they used donated police vehicles. the police called them in to help. they didn’t say “fuck the system” wholesale, burn it to the ground, & make something better in the ashes. they sprang up from the community, ensured their quality of service was better, & offered their help.

We’d get a lot farther if we actually learned from & emulated our past successes instead of just using them as rhetorical defenses for our current failures.

[sci-fi-gifs]

Nope (2022) dir. Jordan Peele

[lolalikesflora]

[tpwrtrmnky]

Tbh I think the "but data centers are important infrastructure, not just AI" talking point misses that like

Ok so roads are important infrastructure. A lot of stuff that's important happens on roads. Now, let's imagine that quadrillionaire Matt Stench has decided that the next big tech innovation is the Wide Car. It's a car that takes up six lanes despite seating only one passenger.

The Wide Car is supposed to be the future, and everyone's going to be driving Wide Cars, even though nobody who makes Wide Cars is turning a profit. Employers are offering Wide Cars as an employee benefit, and getting "nah." Some employers are going as far as demanding their employees drive Wide Cars, and the result is that people take time out of their workdays to get in the mandatory gas usage for their Wide Car before driving home in a regular car.

In spite of the fact that the Wide Car is clearly set to fail, there's an enormous push to expand to twelve-lane roads to accommodate a bunch of Wide Cars that simply will not materialize. This is not an organic response to demand, but a speculative investment that amplifies the existing issues with road development for no good reason.

That is the problem.

[tpwrtrmnky]

Oh and the road infrastructure project is buying up resources other people could have used for literally anything else. With money they promise they'll be making from Wide Car sales any day now.

[tpwrtrmnky]

Okay so what I'm getting from the notes is that when you try to transplant some techbro nonsense into an offline equivalent, you have to be careful to avoid simply inventing something the Americans are already doing in real life

[rage-cupcakes]

The other thing about AI data centers is they're incredibly purpose-specific. A data center built to be packed with GPUs is not a normal data center, and most the things people actually want to do--browse websites, use apps, talk to their friends, post, whatever--don't require GPUs.

These data centers aren't even useful in their own right.

[tpwrtrmnky]

I'm one of the people who've used large amounts of GPUs for research purposes, and it's way worse: A fraction of the power of many of these data centers could be used to power an entire PhD's worth of research, but they're being used to do This Bullshit instead.

[beardedmrbean]

they used to let kids have real fun

[afriendofblahaj]

There's an xkcd for that :3

Side note: polonium-210 is a very dangerous isotope, however it "does not pose a radiation hazard when kept outside the body", as the alpha particle it emits have very little penetration power and cannot pierce even the outer layers of dead skin. It has still killed countless people, though, not because of children's rings, but because of tobacco. Polonium latches onto and concentrates in tobacco leaves, leading to heavy smokers being exposed to more radiation than survivors of the Chernobyl disaster.

It's always wild to me seeing comments about different toxins like this on information about random things in the past, but it's never discussed when it comes to cigarettes.

[stardustandtea]

Adding a relevant source on the polonium-210 in tobacco and how the industry tried to keep it quiet

[friendlynoodles]

I painted my cats as pikmin 🌱🌺

[betelgzart]

More Olimar sketches! 🌱 After seeing what happens in the first game, I'm doing my best to never leave any Pikmin behind on my Pikmin 2 run :'(

[ziyingchenczy]

The difference…

[picto-bug]

do you happen to have any sub one bugs rattling around in here

Sub1s :D! I love the general agreement that both names are still applicable

[theweeklydiscourse]

Shippers get a lot of lashings for being annoying and “forcing romance” but not enough is being said about people who force the nuclear family structure on everything. Nothing against found families, but the amount of people who seem to cram every dynamic into a cookie cutter nuclear family mold is driving me insane. It’s another lowkey reductive way of engaging with characters that pretends to less reductive than the shippers they constantly complain about. Not every relationship can be categorized as “sibling coded” or “father-daughter” because most relationships are more complicated than that. Don’t even get me started on the way these people use “coding” *cough* their headcanons *cough* to shut down ships they dislike.

[myfavoritedemons]

can't believe i only just learned TODAY that anthony hopkins based his voice as hannibal lector on his experience working with katharine hepburn in the lion in winter because the moment i found out it changed everything like 'GOOD EVENING CLARICE' you can absolutely hear that it is a hepburn impression if you know

~learning acting from mother~

[jay-rayart]

When I was in 5th grade a girl told me that “black boys couldn’t be pretty” it took me a long time to see something worthwhile in the mirror

[klapollo]

if youre in the US (especially the northeast + michigan) i would avoid bagged salads/greens and generally wash your produce very thoroughly unless you want the diarrhea parasite

[klapollo]

Outbreak of diarrhea-causing parasite grows to more than 1,000 cases

Michigan is experiencing its largest outbreak of a parasitic infection that causes severe diarrhea. Nearly 1,000 people have been diagnosed

this is not life-threatening, but also who wants weeks of diarrhea and a fucking parasite in them lol. if you suspect you've already had this and it's passed, i would see a doctor. you might need an antiparasitic anyway. if you're actively sick, see a doctor and they might be able to prescribe medication to help you get over it faster.

try to avoid eating raw vegetables, scrub fruit with a produce brush and rinse thoroughly with water. again, don't bother with premade greens or bagged salads. if you buy lettuce, remove the outer 2-3 layers of leaves.

there are UNVERIFIED rumors that the greens have been linked to a company that sources to taco bell. some locations have been actively pulling fresh ingredients like lettuce, avocado, and pico de gallo to mitigate the threat, so i would avoid any products from them just in case. considering how vast supply chains are, i'd be wary of any fast food greens in general for now.

[borrelia]

also note this is a PARASITIC infection. most diarrhea-causing pathogens you expect to contaminate your greens are bacteria (e.g. e. coli and salmonella), which are a different domain of organism altogether. cyclospora is a protozoan, which is bigger and more complicated than a bacteria (for reference, malaria is also caused by a protozoan). bacterial diarrhea can be dangerous, but you might also expect to weather it and survive unscathed. do NOT fuck with PARASITIC contamination. you should be scared of this one!

[gourde]

Another note: YOU CAN'T WASH IT OFF!

Only high temperatures will kill cyclospora. It resides in what is like a shell, which is highly resistant to water and most cleaning chemicals. The substance it uses to cling to food is so strong we don't even fully know what its limits are. It may be best to avoid fruits and veggies you can't cook. Scrubbing only works if done hard enough and on foods with no hiding places (Like cucumbers and grapes). Peeling the skin off is your best bet at avoiding it however, scrubbing is not guaranteed.

Thank you OP for posting! Usually washing does work on most sicknesses, just not this one.

[dropinart]

Everyone say thank you Entrapdak for curing my artblock

[falafelka]

“She-ra is not a sword..She-ra is you”

[destiel-news-channel]

[Image ID: The Destiel confession meme edited so that Dean answers 'JK Rowling posted upskirt photos of a woman on Twitter' to Cas 'I love you'. /End ID]

No one doing this should be allowed to call themselves a feminist.

JK Rowling deadnamed and posted 'upskirt' photo of trans woman on X

The wealthy author escalated a social media spat that resulted in posting a photo from a 2023 event at the Institute of Economic Affairs in

[solarishashernoseinabook]

Let's not beat around the bush: Children's author JK Rowling sexually harassed someone. In some jurisdictions, this would count as sexual abuse. JK Rowling has committed a sex crime against a woman and fell back on the old rape apologist standby of "she was asking for it".

I hope your nostalgia is worth it

[aeide]

completed weaving of the penelope skyphos from chiusi:

the header is tablet-woven linen, with the linen weft for the band used as the warp for the rest of the piece on a warp-weighted loom, which you can see in the photos below (there is also a previous post with more process photos here). the reverse is a negative mirror image of the front, since I wove this as double-weave pickup rather than tapestry:

additional details below the cut:

the bottom and side borders of the finished piece are tablet-woven with a mixture of linen and mercerized cotton. the sides are a classic meander motif, while the bottom border includes the "X" square from the skyphos itself. the bottom border was woven directly onto the piece using the remainder of the warp beneath penelope's feet (tablet draft for anyone interested—I designed it to be twist-neutral and everything). the side borders are sewn on because I didn't set up the side borders when I started the project, but ellen harlizius-klück previously executed a stunning version here that has the side borders woven in, as well as a really helpful video on this technique.

I was originally planning to leave part of the black warp threads unwoven to serve as penelope's warp, the way I did a few years ago with the amasis painter vase:

but I couldn't figure out how to execute it well in this version, especially since I was doing double-weave and not tapestry. perhaps next time! overall, this was a complicated and fun project as a first warp-weighted loom piece. I learned a lot of important lessons—chief among them being to actually calculate warp lengths instead of eyeballing them and to increase the loom weights on the warps for better tension. unfortunately, I also learned I want to build a large warp-weighted loom (the one I have now was made by jennifer marcus at fiber paintings studio and it is lovely, but I would like to weave larger pieces.)

the original pot also features telemachus standing over a grieving penelope (I had room only for his spear), perhaps a reference to the scene in book 1 when he reprimands his mother and orders her back upstairs:

Odysseus was not the only one who did not come back home again from Troy. Many were lost. Go in and do your work. Stick to the loom and distaff. Tell your slaves to do their chores as well. It is for men to talk, especially me. I am the master. οὐ γὰρ Ὀδυσσεὺς οἶος ἀπώλεσε νόστιμον ἦμαρ ἐν Τροίῃ, πολλοὶ δὲ καὶ ἄλλοι φῶτες ὄλοντο. ἀλλ᾽ εἰς οἶκον ἰοῦσα τὰ σ᾽ αὐτῆς ἔργα κόμιζε, ἱστόν τ᾽ ἠλακάτην τε, καὶ ἀμφιπόλοισι κέλευε ἔργον ἐποίχεσθαι: μῦθος δ᾽ ἄνδρεσσι μελήσει πᾶσι, μάλιστα δ᾽ ἐμοί: τοῦ γὰρ κράτος ἔστ᾽ ἐνὶ οἴκῳ.

Od. 1.354–359. Emily Wilson translation.

my plan is to eventually create a larger version of this piece that includes telemachus and the meta aspect of unwoven warp threads. it would also be interesting to figure out if I can weave a different image on the back of the cloth, since the reverse of the pot itself depicts eurycleia recognizing odysseus as she washes his feet.