Trying to get to the horizon, but the damn thing keeps running away from me every time I get closer to it. I do the science, and the magic, and the linguistics, and maybe writing, and other stuff
I'm a cow milk fan but this ad is baffling. "Don't drink oat milk it's made of oats!!!" We know that's why it's called oat milk. Are they against porridge too.
I know the whole "processed foods are evil somehow" thing is getting out of hand but this is a level I haven't seen before.
Probably about additives? Like the extra oil and sugar or whatever but that's a hard hill to clean those drinks have been around for a long arse time. Possibly as long as dairy? I know almond milk is bronze age.
Obviously Anya is adopted. We all know this. She knows this. She loves her family but knows it is incredibly fragile.
But unlike most adoption stories (say Natsume Yuujinchou) Anya is not adopted into a loving functional family who's main goal is to support and love her until she heals from all the hurt she has been through.
Because Everyone in their family is adopted.
Yor enters thinking she is entering an existing family dynamic of a man and his daughter. She is the step mother, eagerly wanted but a definite outsider. She does not know about how they lost Loid's first wife. They both Never mention her but Anya clearly has Huge feelings about her Mommy that she cannot touch. Because Loid refuses to acknowledge her. Which means she's not allowed to.
She's a wife brought in to solve a problem. The fact she adores Anya and loves Loid (eventually) doesn't make her any less of an outsider from her perspective. To Yor she's the adopted family member.
Meanwhile Loid, the one who brought them all together almost instantly finds himself on the outside of the family. He works too much and doesn't make it home for dinner frequently. He struggles to connect with his 'daughter' and wife. Can't understand either of them despite constant efforts. Something incredibly distressing for him.
Yor instantly connects with this child when he struggled to hold her hand in public. In his eyes Yor and Anya are a family and he is the outsider only there for the mission. The man who is destined to Not be there. He too often fills the role of the outside child brought into a happy family. One he constantly feels he is fumbling or failing. (If I'm not good, if i'm not perfect- my family will leave me. So I have to be. I have to figure out how to be better)
They are a family of adopted members all holding so tightly to each other. Each one of them chooses the others over and over again. Struggles against their own limitations and fears to be a part of a family they're all terrified to really call their own.
But it is that choice that makes them a family. Not blood or marriage or any certificate. That they all keep trying to be a family to the others. I'll be a good girl and study hard Papa. I'll be a good wife, I'll play my role well so don't abandon me. I'll be a good father and husband, I will try to be a good husband and father if you both will just stay with me. Please. I will figure out how.
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
Please save and share this info where possible. This report has since been removed by Amnesty International due to legal threats of libel from JK Rowling. This information is no longer easily accessible.
all the rights that come with marriage you should be able to have without marriage btw. you should be able to designate a person who can visit you in the hospital regardless of your relationship to that person.
i'm rereading the murderbot diaries and murderbot's utter conviction that it and gurathin are bitter enemies is still so funny. buddy. gurathin got over this months ago. he's just a quiet guy.
one-sided antagonism is so delicious. murderbot diaries i also very much enjoy how surreal it must be for gurathin / to know that the heavily armed rogue secunit holds a grudge against him / and also know that all it will ever choose to do about this is make frowny faces and flip him the bird. / (tags via space-mouse)
vampire: ugh, you mortals simply can't comprehend the timescale i live on. i've watched your empires rise and fall, your cities crumble to dust. i find your short little lives amusing at best. i -
angel: HI, I HAVE BEEN ALIVE SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME AND I NOTICED YOU ARE ALSO SOMEWHAT OLD?
vampire: ...sure. hey what was the dawn of time like?
vampire: oh, man, i feel you. i slept through, like, the entire 14th century it was so boring. everyone was dying of plague and shit anyway so i didn't miss much.
Labubus are blind bags but they're also blind bags with some of the most insane dark patterns stacked on top. The online store for them has a thing where they tell you what you got the second you order it online so that you can immediately try again if you didn't get the thing you wanted.
There's also a shake feature that is designed to encourage you to buy more than one by narrowing down the possibility space on a crate of options so that if you're hunting a specific model you can verify that it's guaranteed to be in one of these three IF you buy all three right now!!!!!
I just thought of this post, which was actually how I learned what Dark Patterns are, because I tried to cancel my Adobe Acrobat subscription, and it took much longer than I anticipated because several times throughout the process it felt like it was intentionally trying to trick me into thinking I'd cancelled my subscription when I actually hadn't yet.
Please read up on Dark Patterns and learn how to recognize them.
I need you young people to know it was almost never this hot when I was a child. Millennials and Gen Xers are all nostalgic and excited about summer because it was about ten to twenty degrees cooler to experience it back then!
I cannot express to you how FAST it has gone. I grew up in a world that does not exist now.
We're starting on the path to reverse it, globally. You might not know how much solar has EXPLODED in the last decade or two. It's gone from a side thing, a weirdo novelty that was just Not Viable... to whole countries investing in infrastructure.
but we have to keep fighting big oil and fascism everywhere we can in order to keep on this road to a new better less scorching burning earth.
But any time you wonder wtf the weather is doing- THIS IS NOT NORMAL, NO. THIS IS NOT WHAT IT WAS EVEN TWENTY YEARS AGO.
When Joseph Lamont Williams refused to leave the public park where he has lived for years, he was charged with a felony. Camping bans are on
When he refused to leave the Nashville public park where he has lived for the past several years, Williams became one of a handful of homeless people in the country to be arrested and charged with a felony for camping on public property.
Eleven states have passed homeless camping bans over the last four years, according to the National Homelessness Law Center. In the two years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that cities can ban people from sleeping and camping in public, more than 300 municipalities have joined them. Supporters of these laws say they enable public officials to enforce rules that already exist and provide incentive for unhoused people to seek shelter. But opponents call the laws cruel and say that an arrest record only makes it harder for those experiencing homelessness to secure a job or a home.
The maximum penalty for felony camping in Tennessee is six years in prison. Williams pled to a lesser charge and was released from jail after nine days.
"The slickest thing was asking me if I knew what I was pleading to," Williams said. "I'm just trying to plead to get out of here." [...]
Williams was one of two people arrested in the park on June 28 and charged under Tennessee's no-camping law — the only one in the country to make sleeping on public property a felony.
Though the law was passed in 2022, advocates for the unhoused say they have never before seen it used like this. [...]
Homelessness in Nashville has been on the rise, according to the city's Homelessness Planning Council, which in December 2025 estimated that roughly 4,300 people experience homelessness in the city, an uptick of more than 30% in less than a year.
Nationally, homelessness has dipped slightly after reaching record levels in 2024. But chronic homelessness has grown, according to 2025 data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD's most recent tally of chronically homeless people in the U.S. found more than 155,000.
Camping bans differ from state to state — some enable the state to level penalties against cities that refuse to enforce the ban; others make it easier for law enforcement to involuntarily commit people experiencing homelessness — but the broad strokes are the same. No camping, or sleeping, on public property.
Many state legislatorshave taken inspiration, or even borrowed legislative language, from the Cicero Institute, a conservative think tank founded by tech billionaire Joe Lonsdale. Lonsdale is a co-founder of Palantir, whose data mining software has been used by local and federal law enforcement, including the CIA and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). [...]
Devon Kurtz, who oversees Cicero's homelessness and public safety policy efforts, has been a vocal critic of the longstanding program model known as Housing First, saying it is ineffective. Housing First, which has long been promoted by experts and homeless outreach workers, aims to get unhoused people into stable housing before attempting to address any other needs, such as mental illness and drug or alcohol addiction. [...]
"My hope is that no one is ever convicted under any of these camping bans," Kurtz said. "The intention is not to jail people. I've also said, however, that sometimes, at the margins, it is essential that law enforcement has the ability to jail them because it can save lives."
Nashville's oldest homeless enclave, Old Tent City, was disbanded last year. The area along the Cumberland River where more than 100 people once lived is now encircled by fences and no-trespassing signs. Krinks said the encampment had been there since the 1980s.
Krinks has seen more security cameras installed around public parks and benches ripped out of the ground in downtown Nashville. The no-camping felony, she said, only makes things more dire for the city's homeless community.
"Punishing people and using police to address homelessness only makes the crisis worse, and it prolongs people's experience of homelessness," said Krinks, who also helped start the statewide coalition Housing for All Tennessee. "Most people I know experiencing homelessness are so hungry for freedom, for agency, for their dignity to be seen and recognized and understood. Jail erodes every aspect of a person's agency."
If you ask Williams how long he's been living in the park, he'll say he doesn't think of it that way. It's not living, he says. It's a place he goes to stay because he doesn't feel like he has anywhere else.
Williams has been offered a bed at a Nashville shelter. He's been approached by service providers over the years. But he doesn't trust those organizations, and doesn't want to leave the neighborhood he considers his own. Instead, he sleeps sprawled across the wooden picnic tables, heats his food up in the sun and does pullups on the monkey bars at the playground.
But the park is not home. Home is the aging public housing complex just up the hill; that's where he grew up. Williams can see it from the picnic benches. No one lives there now. [...]
Last month, prosecutors charged Williams with two felony counts of camping and one misdemeanor charge of evading arrest. According to charging documents, Williams attempted to flee after police officers told him they had a warrant for his arrest. That's when he was tased.
Alissa Heydari, a court-appointed attorney who represented Williams in the camping case, said the arrest "makes what is already a very difficult life situation for Mr. Williams harder and worse."
Williams pled guilty to the misdemeanor charge and was sentenced to time served. Prosecutors dropped the two felony counts on the condition of his plea, Heydari said. He was released from custody on July 6, nine days after his arrest.
As far as Cicero is concerned, this is the law working as it should.
Joseph Williams, 49, a chronically homeless man, was arrested on June 28 and charged with two felony counts of camping on state property after police found him living in a public park in East Nashville. He spent nine days in jail before the felony charges were dismissed by a judge. After his release, he returned to the park.
If your system doesn't account for the fact that Parents Are Going To Be Abusive/Neglectful/Insufficient then it objectively sucks I'm sorry I don't make the rules
Monitored bank accounts for those under 18. Requiring parental consent for medical procedures. Parental controls on personal devices. "We won't teach this at school because parents are supposed to address it at home." Anything that puts all of the child's power onto the parents' hand, anything that assumes parents are going to inherently do enough of a good job no one else needs to interfer, every single one of these IS going to be used by controlling, neglectful or unprepared parents and already are, and if the system did not account for that very real, tangible, dangerous tendency, then it's not worth fucking anything. You shouldn't make things "for the youth"/with children in mind if you are going to overlook this painfully common aspect of their lives u_u
When those GPS trackers for cars were released, specifically advertised for parents to put in their child's car, I saw the ad on TV and said out loud, "God... I wonder how many abusive parents and spouses are gonna use that to keep their victims from escaping."
My dad was sat next to me and his eyes got big as saucers. He was so quiet when he replied solemnly, "I didn't even think about that... jesus christ, that's dark..." and I had to tell him I had friends who were probably gonna end up in that situation with their conservative parents. He was so removed from the notion of using that device for cruelty that he didn't even CONSIDER it! That's how easily people can be bought in by inventions/legislation advertised under the guise of "keeping the kids safe". My own father, who is a beautiful and gentle man with a good head on his shoulders, was ready to advocate for a tracking device, because it was sold as a device to "protect children".
Children need more protections from abusers, yes, but the biggest protection they could possibly have is AUTONOMY. GIVE CHILDREN AUTONOMY.
