That One Blog That Does The Thing

[kiramartinauthor]

WHY YOU SHOULD WRITE HORRIBLY:

1. You’ll never write anything if you don’t

[oysters-aint-for-me]

BJ has a very clear understanding of Objectives unfortunately he lacks that level of comprehension when it comes to tactics methods procedures etc. Thus: his Behaviors.

[oysters-aint-for-me]

[chemicalcain]

this is the single best description i have ever heard for a cat

[ariadne-mouse]

he is Calculating

[theotherwesley]

thoughts have to be tilted in order to go into the right part of brain for solve

[bixbythemartian]

the funny story about the cat with a Hispanic-sounding name being summoned for jury duty because the cat was mysteriously registered to vote (even though the owner has never registered to vote, which is the 'punchline' of the story) is asking you to swallow some basic (racist, incorrect, and conservative) assumptions about the way voter registration works in the United States of America in the guise of a funny story about 'bureaucracy'.

[sunshinetheinspiration]

Link to the story in question

@bixbythemartian would you be willing to expand on this? I definitely didn’t read it that way and had questions about some details of the story myself but took it to be essentially “cat somehow gets on jury duty list, no one knows how or why but US gov bureaucracy is so ridiculous that the cat has to show up in person to be excused”

[bixbythemartian]

'us gov bureaucracy is so ridiculous that a cat has to show up in person to be excused from jury duty' is also expressing an inherently conservative viewpoint*, it's just a much more commonly accepted one.

but, to your point, the cat didn't 'somehow' get on the jury duty list, it was on the jury duty list very specifically because the cat was registered to vote. the unspoken assumption is that it's so easy to register to vote that even a cat can do it! the cat is even jokingly accused of voter fraud. of which, of course, the cat is innocent.

it is left to the reader's imagination how that happened, and who else could potentially register to vote.

this post is not in any way intending to blame anybody who read that and thought 'huh, what a funny story' and thought nothing more about it. this post is intending to demonstrate the ideology underlying the story going around, that one might have missed on a first reading.

*this is why they gutted a bunch of government services at the beginning of the current president's term, and continue to try to do so, in the name of cutting through red tape and inefficiency and useless spending. the number of people who have died to these cuts is currently unclear (the departments responsible for measuring such things also were massively cut and downsized), but estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, at the moment, and projected to go into the millions.

[clearlyafandomblog]

also it appears that the story is a retelling ripoff of a real story that happened all the way back in 2010. here's an article from 2011 bemoaning the circulation of the viral story as if it was breaking news when it was (at the time) already a year old:

Jury Duty Cat: Why a Viral Story Is a Media Fail

When One Website Reported a Year-Old Story as New, Dozens of Big Outlets Followed; Welcome to the Web Rewrite Echo Chamber

i admit, i also uncritically reblogged that story, in no small part because i knew a cat had in fact been summoned for jury duty before! the voter registration stuff pinged as odd, but the humor of the situation overrode my inner critic. in the original, real story, the cat had been listed as a pet in the census, which is how he somehow ended up on the jury roll. the other details - right on down to the first exemptions being denied and a vet being asked to write testimony that the potential juror was in fact, a cat - were lifted directly from this sixteen-year-old news story.

knowing all this now, it's almost impossible not to see the doctoring of the story as what it is - a pernicious and intentional production of conservative dogwhistling horseshit. knowing that the SAVE act is in senate yet again, it is difficult to imagine this registered voter cat story as anything but malicious propaganda designed to sow doubt around our voting systems.

[cabybapa]

wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

[musashi]

Hey can you guys reblog Cheeseburger so he can take a sunbeam nap on lots of blogs. No other reason I just want you guys to see him.

[musashi]

So, Cheeseburger died on November 21st after an unfairly short battle with an unfairly rare cancer that is rarely seen in cats. I only got to spend a month with him after his diagnosis, and losing him has been the greatest heartbreak of my entire life so far. He was my best friend and my soul cat, and he was there for me when I was completely alone, for twelve long years.

I made this transparent PNG the night he died in preparation for one of the many ways I was going to memorialize him--a surface rug in his likeness that I planned on laying directly in the line of his favourite sunbeam. And I uploaded that PNG here, because this is the website where people post their cats.

I was not expecting the reception I got. Many people have pointed out that this post has more reblogs than likes, and how insane that is in 2025 when reblog culture is at an all time low. I didn't even talk about the fact that Burger passed away in the original post, it wasn't a tearjerker reblog bait or anything like that. People just loved Burger that much, in the same way I fell in love with him at first sight. He was such an ugly kitten.

Anyways, it's really special to me that so many people have reblogged my best friend. I made this PNG to memorialize him in a completely different way, and you all wound up doing just that in ways I never even imagined.

Thank you. Wherever he is, I know the sun is shining.

[daysleftofsecondterm]

Beautiful, you don’t HAVE to forgive them. You just can’t ridicule them after leaving for being “tainted” or “evil” or whatever the acceptable word is now. Do not punish the behaviour you want to see.

“But they should’ve known sooner” and we should’ve known sooner that Destiel was never gonna meaningfully happen outside of queerbaiting, what’s your point?

“I never want them near me” that’s fine, but you do realize to insult them, YOU have to get near THEM, right? Wouldn’t it be more conducive to what you want to just leave each other alone?

“What if one of them tries to approach me?” Then you block them online, or you keep the conversation clinical and polite irl. You do NOT take time out of your day to berate them for their old views. Your mother raised you better than that.

[pavilarg0]

Preserving these tags, they're very correct

[llamaking]

I would reblog this one million times if I could

[daysleftofsecondterm]

As a matter of fact you can!

[ink-in-hand]

This is fundamentally how cults WORK, btw

Villainize outsiders, which can look different depending on the cult, make everything an us vs them situation. And then when those outsiders show themselves to be hostile (doesn't matter why) the cult is proven right all along on one of their foundational messages

[why-dontiknow]

yeah so i just spent about 2 hours drawing hair? and its not even close to finished!? nice.

[sawthoone]

project hail mary animatic i finished a few days ago! contains spoilers of a scene towards the end of the book…

[larkandkatydid]

It’s cool how we found the secret elixir that cures all human disease and it’s in this guy’s bitey little mouth

[larkandkatydid]

What this guy’s bitey little mouth has been recently up to:

[sauriansolutions]

This is why scientists study everything.

[mikkeneko]

Put this picture in your pocket, next time you get into an argument with someone about 'useless' scientific studies, ask them "Do you think that we should give funding to study the mating habits of endangered iguanas in the Sonoran desert, or should we be funding cures for alzheimer's and diabetes?" and then when they say "Of course we should be using that money to fund cures!" you can whip out this picture and say "trick question, it's the same thing"

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

sick, nauseous, retching at how corporate interests demand all technological advancement must come at the cost of choice and consent, must be forcefed to the uncooperative consumer. a digital menu would be useful? 'k great, they're FUCKING MANDATORY :D Wireless earbuds are an innovation, so we stole your fucking earphone jack. hard to find coins for the laundry machine? no problem, now you can pay with card, in fact you must pay with card, in fact you must DOWNLOAD AN APP TO WASH A LOAD ON MED-TEMP QUICK CYCLE. you want to park your car? you want to PARK your CAR you dumb CUCKFUCKLE? you weeping seeping pathetic pustulant bedsore of an open wound???

download our app! give us your data! give us control of your money, your time, your viewership, your exhaustion!!! give us your location, your viewing history, your marketable hopes and third-party-resellable dreams, we require access to your eyes your ears your motherfucking synapses, click here to accept OUR terms and OUR conditions!!!

to us you aren't a person per se, but you could aspire to someday be a profit

[throathole]

I really love when cats use their front legs to hold something in place while they use their back legs to kick the absolute shit out of it

[thatoneblogthatdoesthething]

Kangaroo Murder

[titleknown]

REBLOG IF YOU'RE EXTREMELY BURNT OUT DESPITE ALSO FEELING LIKE YOU'VE DONE NOTHING WORTHWHILE AT ALL WITH YOUR LIFE!

[stayoutofitnick]

[unashamedly-enthusiastic]

Unfortunately, I do love you now that you can dance

[mishafletcher]

ok, but honestly, it is unfortunate. you know how we’re always passing around that ‘you are not immune to propaganda’ meme? this is the propaganda it’s talking about.

it’s cute dancing robots! they have a cute robot dog! it’s cute! it’s friendly!

well, the robot dog friend? cute little jumpy guy, does some careful ballet-esque steps, often between the humanoid robots? so far, both the boston police and the nypd (heads up: autoplaying video, with sound) have ‘deployed’ the cute dog friend. both departments say that the robots are being used as ‘observation devices’, sent into buildings with lights and a camera that sends a videofeed back to the cops. 

part of why i think this video (and others like it) is so interesting is because boston dynamics has defended police use of the robots, saying that there’s a clause that the robots can’t be used in a way that would ‘physically harm or intimidate people’. i don’t know about you, but if i were at, say, a protest, or honestly literally anywhere, and a robot dog started running towards me, i’d be pretty fucking intimidated. i’d assume that it was going to hurt me. if one of the humanoid robots were running towards me, i’d assume it was straight-up about to kill me. 

but these videos do a lot of work to erode that assumption. how can anyone claim that they’re intimidated by, say, a line of robot dogs at a protest? the robot dogs do funny dances online! the video above has been live for about two months, and it has thirty million views. people love them! they can dance!

so when they start being used as mobile security cameras, or when they start being used to maintain a perimeter or for crowd control or whatever, it’s not really a violation of the contract. the robots are friendly! my bet is that when they start setting them out to do security or whatever—and i don’t doubt that they’ll be used for security, etc—they might even do funny little dances and interact with people who stop to gawk at them. anything to normalize increasingly autonomous roboticized policing. get one of the humanoid ones out in the field, and it’s a remarkably short step to autonomous, mobile cctv—that can also detain you if it doesn’t like what you’re doing, or if there was a crime and you’re in the area, or if your face looks like someone from a database, or—

and all that assumes, of course, that the no-harm clause stays there forever, and that police departments, so famous for their love of doing things by the book, adhere to it. but just for fun, watch that video again, and imagine even one of those robots weaponized, outfitted with even ‘nonlethal’ crowd control. 

i’m not arguing that the robots are inherently bad, or that there’s no reasonable use for them, even by cops. but the time to get critical of them is now, not in five or ten years when their use has been largely normalized. this is cute propaganda, but it’s still propaganda, and we should acknowledge it for what it is.

[radicalurbanista]

anyway this is how to disable the Spot robo-dog that the NYPD just purchased

[wondersmith-and-sons]

also? the naming of “Spot the police dog” goes deliberately hand-in-hand with how the language of anti-protest policing deweaponises it from the actual harm caused. labels like “non-lethal” and “less lethal” guns, which fire “foam rounds”, “bean-bag rounds” and “rubber bullets” have taken out eyes and cracked open skulls, are deliberately named to make them sound more harmless than they are. 

foam bullets are solid metal and foam-tipped, bean-bag rounds are sacks of cloth filled with lead pellets and rubber bullets are metal bullets that have rubber-coating - it’s a deliberate trick of language to make writing and reporting about it diminish the violence they cause the victims. 

“police fired bean bag rounds and foam bullets at protestors” sounds like the cops are using kindergarden weapons and not shooting to kill. 

“police deployed spot the robot dog for crowd-control measures” (which is how it will inevitably be written) makes it sound like it’s some cutesy doctor who sidekick out there yelping at protestors, rather than a weaponised, mobile, agile hunk of metal that is designed to break your fucking arm. 

[roach-works]

police dogs already have a long history of looking cute on camera–everyone loves dogs!–while being brutally trained to do enormous amounts of damage to people they’re set on.  they can, and have, killed people.

spot the robot police dog isn’t likely to be less harmless, especially since it’s apparently capable of crushing limbs and taking off fingers from day one.

[someeragonmemes]

Btw if you’ve never seen pics from the Eragon 2007 video game you’re missing out

like what is going on here

[thatoneblogthatdoesthething]

My response to this image:

There is a 0.000003% chance of being killed by a foreign born terrorist in America. Since 9/11 white right wing extremists have killed almost twice as many Americans as terrorists have. I'm more scared of radicalized white men to be quite honest. 79% of mass shooters are white males. 97% are males. I have a 1 in 300 chance of being killed by an American with a gun. Nationals of the seven countries singled out by Trump in the "Muslim Ban" have killed zero people in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1975 and 2015.

Zero.

Over the last four decades, 20 out of 3.25 million refugees welcomed to the United States have been convicted of attempting or committing terrorism on U.S. soil, and only three Americans have been killed in attacks committed by refugees—all by Cuban refugees in the 1970s.

Between 1975 and 2015, the “annual chance of being murdered by somebody other than a foreign-born terrorist was 252.9 times greater than the chance of dying in a terrorist attack committed by a foreign-born terrorist,” according to Nowrasteh.

Here is some more information:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/514361/

I'm not saying that it's not an issue, but you should be more afraid of driving your car to work than you should of people fleeing everything they've ever known for the hope of safety until they can either return home or settle elsewhere.

I saw something once about a bowl of m&ms, and how if one of those was poisoned and I was told to eat a handful, would I? And if they were m&ms, of course not. No way. But if each of those m&ms represented a person, and for every m&m I ate a saved a life, I'd swallow every last m&m in that bowl. Even if it meant I'd surely die. Because if I saved a child from a horrific life full of fear and pain, a single child, it would be worth it.

Not everyone can say the same, and that's okay. But my hope is that someday compassion will be greater than fear for everyone in America. On that day, we will indeed be the greatest country in the world. I love my country dearly, and I believe in its potential. I believe in what it was created for. I believe in the ideals we have held up, the words written on our most sacred monuments.

Not a single word indicates that Americans choose fear over compassion. Recent history tells a different story. Donald Trump wants to make America Great. But what makes America great isn't fear. It's diversity, individuality, compassion, the American dream.

[gayhyuna]

[iwouldgiveyouthemoonn-deactivat]

don't call me out like that 😳

[mistresskabooms]

Yes.