A Writer

[auxryn]

I think now is a good time for us all to review the principle of Jury Nullification.

Jury Nullification is when a jury finds a defendant Not Guilty even though they (perhaps secretly) believe them to be guilty.

In the United States, this has come up primarily in the case of 'escaped slave laws'. Good people are not willing to send formerly enslaved people back to their captors.

Governments hate this sort of behavior. But it's hard to stop. How have they tried?

1. They keep it secret. Jurors are not informed of this possibility. Activists who talk to jurors in front of courthouses have been arrested.

2. Jury Selection. Anyone who brings up nullification in jury selection gets removed. All jurors musts agree to "accept as correct the rulings and instructions of the law as provided by the judge." But they can't stop you from changing your mind.

3. Declare a Mistrial. If the defense or anyone else mentions nullification, they can scrub the whole thing and try again with a fresh jury. They will also find excuses to strike individual jurors if they need to.

4. They Flat Out Lie to You. Quoting Wikipedia here:

In 2017, a jury was instructed: "You cannot substitute your sense of justice, whatever that means, for your duty to follow the law, whether you agree with it or not. It is not for you to determine whether the law is just or whether the law is unjust. That cannot be your task. There is no such thing as valid jury nullification. You would violate your oath and the law if you willfully brought a verdict contrary to the law given to you in this case." The Ninth Circuit upheld the first three sentences of the jury's instruction and overruled the remainder but deemed that instruction a harmless error and affirmed the conviction.[67]

So expect scary people to tell you that you are breaking the law if don't give the verdict they want you to give.

But you don't have to do what they tell you to. If you find yourself on a jury you can come to whatever conclusions your conscience demands.

Maybe that bag of weed looks like oregano to you. Maybe that gun looks like a prop. Maybe the cop or the prosecutor seems shifty. Perhaps the defendant just has an honest face.

You can always find a reasonable doubt. Fuck you I won't do what you tell me to.

[nando161mando]

[tastefullyoffensive]

[tastefullyoffensive]

It’s October! You know what that means... 🎃 (via kxvo)

[queerlyglittering]

all my life I’ve somehow only ever seen the gifs of this. I never even knew that the pumpkin man was dancing to the Ghostbusters theme. This whole thing is so much better than I ever could have expected from the gifs omg

[huffy-the-bicycle-slayer]

I haven't seen dancing pumpkin guy ONCE this year, are you guys okay?

[huffy-the-bicycle-slayer]

FINE! I'll do it myself

[camtankerous]

One of the fun things about using tumblr is every once in a while your dash will get flooded with a very specific kind of content and you have to ask “okay, did something happen in the world recently to make everyone care about this, or do i have one mutual that’s just really into posting about johnny appleseed today”

[fruitpilled-peachcel]

[nuggss]

Ants be like that

[conspiring-limabean]

I used to keep track of the different ant colonies in my yard as a child and it was the wildest shit. You could tell the difference between colonies by colors & pattern if you looked closely enough. They’d stage ant wars on the sidewalks that lasted days, just ants murdering each other, and the cleanup afterwards would last days longer as the survivors pick up and carry away the carcasses. Once I saw a war happening between the colony that lived under the berry bush and a colony I didn’t recognize, and evidently the berry colony lost, because after the war their nest site was empty… and then a few days later was inhabited by the other colony that had fought them.

Once at a lake I saw an ant travel like 3 meters across flat rock carrying a dead ant, and he kept going until he got to the cliff side and then kept going down towards the water, and he didn’t stop until he got to where the rock was wet. Then he stood there for a few seconds, dropped the corpse into the water, waited a little longer, and then headed back the way he came. I feel like I witnessed a ceremony

[fiollaigean]

[womenintheirwebs-archived]

the one problem i have with people my age and younger is that a lot of us do not have hands on hobbies. like i have spoken to so many people my age who go to work, go to school and then fuck around on their phone/computer for hours and then ???????? like no wonder ur depressed and have low confidence in urself. u need to get ur hands on something, feed those dopamine receptors! learn how to play guitar, garden, scrapbook, fucking make model trains. i don’t give a shit, MAKE SOMETHING!!

it feels better than drugs when i finish making a thing—and then show it off or gift it.

and then so people my age say to me ‘well—i can’t draw/paint/knit/etc. like you can. my stuff would be terrible.’ yeah, well duh—a part of developing skill is sucking at something and then practicing it over and over and over again until you suck less. u’ll have a hard time feeling lonely or bored when you can’t stop thinking abt a technique you want to try or something you want to make for someone else. making things has SAVED MY LIFE. it gave me a reason to keep living day after day when i wanted to die.

making things have improved my generational relationships (when i worked for the newspaper i would talk to customers abt jamming recipes or cross-stitch, one of my grandmas always gives me pattern books and tell me abt when she knitted things for mom, my other grandma is giving me a wedding quilt that HER grandma gave her 50 years ago because she knows i will appreciate it). it also got me likeminded friends who also make things.

take a ceramics class! pick up water colors, bake cakes! learn to work on cars! make soap. DO SOMETHING THAT DOESN’T INVOLVE STARING AT A SCREEN.

[bandomfandombeyond]

Hobbies cost money, Helen.

[royalharkinian]

Do you eat? Then you can have a hobby.

Can you see green outside? Can you get some dirt? Then you can have a hobby.

Do you have a pen and paper? Hobby.

Something with a keyboard? Hobby.

The ability to walk? Hobby.

Get creative and don't be a pessimist is step one Barabra. 

[dronwen]

Acting like it’s easy or simple to have an ENJOYABLE hobby on zero budget is a puerile view that shifts the blame for the unhappiness of people trapped at the bottom of a dehumanizing, vicious system. Its possible of course. There are people who are into things that can be done cheaply, and that’s great! But not everyone takes joy in the things that can be done on a budget of next to nothing, and we shouldn’t EXPECT people to!

[appropriately-inappropriate]

Might as well lie down and die then! God forbid anyone try to better themselves.

Have two feet and a heartbeat? Go for a fucking walk, do some pushups, volunteer to play with shelter dogs.

Have two hands and a heartbeat? Sketch. Napkins are free, steal a pen from your job, voila! Picasso.

Have one hand and a pacemaker? Might I recommend composing music on garage band?

The Y offers low-cost social classes. There are also coding classes online. Turn a hobby into a job!

Your computer has a microphone. Start making podcasts.

Crafty and bedbound? Try watercolours; they’re available at the dollar store.

Granola hippy? Get a towel, find a floor, queue up a yoga tutorial on YouTube. Namaste.

Garden witch? Dollarstore pot and a small bag of potting mix. Take your old head of lettuce, keep the bottom wet for a day, put butt of lettuce into dirt. Voila. Salad. Mint works well and is likewise indestructible.

Not into sports? Read books online. There are thousands of classic titles available. Internet got cut off? Library. Illiterate? Perfect — there’s your project. Or: books on tape, available at your local library, for free.

Look — I don’t take joy in my commute and I wish I had a helicopter to take me everywhere I wanted to go. But whining about my misfortune doesn’t solve my problem, and neither does this defeatist attitude.

If you have the time and tech to scroll this website, you have the time to develop a fulfilling hobby.

Anything else is just wallowing in your own misery because the alternative — trying and failing — is too daunting.

Oh well. Life is daunting. So either get it done or get it over with; it does not get any easier.

[libertarirynn-deactivated202006]

Lmao y’all are really over here assmad at the very idea of bettering your lives in any way. It’s kind of pathetic.

[sandersstudies]

“Have you guys considered doing something worthwhile that makes you happy? :) ”

Tumblr: no, and I will not, and you’re ableist and classist for suggesting such a thing fuck off

[sewickedthread]

Knot-tying & macramé - you can often find yarn at thrift shops or dollar stores (not always but with some frequency).

YouTube tutorials, websites, and learn to mend your clothes. Some outlay for thread, needles, scissors, and maybe patches and buttons. But spending less money buying new clothes..

Dollar stores often have coloring books & pencils, too. Go wild. Color the sun blue, grass purple, & trees red. Go outside the lines. Add stuff to the picture.

Sharpie pen & rounded rocks - draw pictures and happy messages and give them to people or leave them to be found.

Cotton string, paint, & paper. Dip string in paint & drape it on paper. Repeat with other colors. It doesn’t matter if your hand shakes, in fact it’s better.

Some craft places & senior centers & community centers have classes for free or for the cost of the materials. Try the craft with just enough materials for 1 project, instead of investing lots of money.

Look up crafts aimed at kids. Those are often simple with inexpensive materials. Get your foot in the creativity door.

[thekickassknitter]

I will teach other depressed fuckers to knit because nothing defeats nihilistic fatalism like wearing the sweater you made from scratch!

[olderthannetfic]

Seriously.

I sympathize with it feeling impossible to get started and with some versions of a hobby being out of reach, but that’s not every version.

If you like plants other than the aforementioned mint, you can often take cuttings from ones beside the road somewhere and get them to grow roots in a glass of water before transplanting them to dirt.

If you like fiber crafts, you can often find odd assortments of yarn for cheap. If you have a local Buy Nothing or other neighborhood giveaway thing, crafters are often decluttering their stashes and giving away nice quality stuff, just in small amounts that you couldn’t make a whole project out of. Maybe you can’t get every size and variety of tool, but a lot of people would be happy to pass on a single pair of needles. I’ve been shocked at how much interesting stuff people just put on the sidewalk because they’re overwhelmed by stuff.

[darkshrimpemotions]

Also like. I get it. The world is bleak sometimes and maybe you have it really rough right now and everything feels pointless. No one is suggesting that a hands-on hobby is going to save the world or cure your depression or solve all your problems. But my god, what’s the alternative? I can’t fix everything, so I deny myself any small scrap of joy? If it doesn’t solve all my problems it’s not worth doing at all? I can’t be the best and have all the most elaborate tools so I might as well not even bother?

Let me tell you, if that’s your approach to life, you’re in for a miserable time.

Know what I did last summer? I impulse bought a bottle of bubble solution at CVS for $1.99. And whenever I had a rough day I went outside and sat down and blew bubbles for a few minutes, experimenting with different ways to hold or dip the wand or get air through it to make different types of bubbles. Trying to make bigger bubbles, or recapture bubbles on the wand without popping them.

It was so small. So silly. It didn’t make anything lasting. It didn’t necessarily build any marketable skills. It wasn’t the hobby I would choose if I had unlimited space and resources. I had nothing to show for it at the end of the day but a slightly less full bottle of bubble solution.

But my god, did I feel better each and every time. For $1.99, an entire summer of time set aside to myself every other day or so, out in the sun, doing something that brought me joy. It was SO SMALL. But it made such a huge difference.

[rachandroll]

#sometimes wrenching yourself out of a shitty life is doing small things one step at a time

[akhuna]

You all know singing is free, right?

[jamiebythesea]

Writing is also basically free

[roach-works]

for almost every hobby that’s been commercially overinflated with kits and high-end materials to the point where you could easily drop hundreds of bucks just to get started, there’s the original core of that hobby. people have always done interesting and creative things with little scraps of material, because people have always been poor. there have always, always been poor people.

if being poor is your excuse for not seeking whatever happiness you can scratch up, you’d be a defeatest sad-sack even if your bank account was seven figures.

scrapbooking used to be done with scrap paper, not expensive stickers and rolls of washi tape and curated packs of ephemera…and the world is full of discarded newspapers, magazines, old books. quilting was done with little bits gleaned from garments worn past any repair, not charm packs that cost forty bucks a pop… and there’s still people throwing out sheets and clothes and skirts today! gardening is a way to get free produce out of kitchen scraps and whatever tiny patch of dirt you can keep clear of weeds and animals…and you can just start composting and collect seeds and cuttings today. sculpture used to be done with mud, from the river near the cave. you don’t have to even leave your cave if you want to make saltdough or paperclay.

hobbies enrich your life. if they’re bankrupting you, that’s not the hobby’s fault, that’s capitalist brainrot fucking you over. you don’t have to make something worthy of instagram in your enormous well-stocked craft room full of custom-engineered high-quality tools. you can just pfuck around and find something cool to do.

[the-real-numbers-deactivated202]

Source

[findsomethingtofightfor]

[insufficiently-advanced]

ok this is a poignant visual metaphor tho

[leatherlavender]

this image made me quit my job.

I remember the first time I saw it, i stared at it for several minutes until I finally just started crying. It made me resolve to leave, and I turned in my resignation about a month later.

[ashfae]

This is your reminder that if life keeps throwing you lemons you are not morally obligated to make lemonade from them. You can duck, or catch them in a trash can, or get a baseball bat and slam those fuckers into the stratosphere.

[angelcak-3]

hm....maybe the reason Percy seems more powerful compared to the other big three kids is because he genuinely loves the ocean while everyone else either only sees their powers as a weapon or they associate it with trauma.

[awkwardexxodus]

thalia, nico, hazel: i avoid using my powers to its full potential because of past events that left me traumatized

percy:

[o-kurwa]

[huffylemon]

I love this so much

[itswalky]

Okay but I want to hear more about the just roommates pretending to be married, feel like there's a story hook there

[aro-ace-of-spades]

And I'll leave it again! Bitch

[bogleech]

CAMPING PSA: DRY ICE ATTRACTS TICKS.

Every year I see dry ice marketed for use by campers, and it’s certainly effective for keeping things cooler longer, but I never see anyone talk about the fact that it’s a tick magnet, to the point that a cooler containing dry ice, even fully closed, is the go-to lure used by field researchers who WANT to attract as many ticks as possible. Here are some tick traps in action:

The fact that people are told to take dry ice with them into the woods, and not told that this is a thing, feels kind of glaring to me??? This happens because dry ice is solid carbon dioxide, and the carbon dioxide in our breath is what ticks use to track us. Not just ticks, either; mosquitoes and other blood-feeding organisms also rely on it. I’ve never been camping myself, but I imagine if you do use dry ice, you should keep it away from where you intend to sit, eat or sleep.

[teal-deer]

@beast-glatisant relevant to draculas discussion

[sleepy-bebby]

🐡

[kisu-no-hi]

[caspercryptid]

New sleep style: hitting the snooze button so many times that you sleep two additional hours in ten minute intervals. I call this Horse Sleep

[caspercryptid]

Worse sleep. That was meant to say worse sleep

[caspercryptid]

I Am So Fucking Tired

[caspercryptid]

Literally immediately after reblogging this to correct it I went "wow, it has a reblog already?" And got all the way to checking my notifs before I realized. That it was me.

[caspercryptid]

I actually wasn't that far off you guys

[caspercryptid]

HOLY SHIT THE POST IS SAVED

[caspercryptid]

Anyway horse sleep: sleep, but horse. Worse. Sleep but worse. Definitely one of the two.