from this by @monochrome-stars

he's really fine guys can't you see. he's smiling and giving a thumbs up 👍

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croque_monsieur

Peacocks are hilarious, really. They really are just like

The first rule of Chekhov's Gun: Have a gun.

From 'The Cornley Drama Festival Part 1' The Goes Wrong Show, S2E4

One large brain in the central body, with two heads acting as eyestalks and appendages like a Pierson's Puppeteer from Larry Niven's Known Space series.

Who controls the 🍑?

A recurring theme I see in discussion of the present wave of Internet content regulation bills is the presumption that politicians are just so old and out of touch that they don't realise that these bills will have a deleterious effect on everyday communication. Y'all, they know. By and large, modern governments just don't want people talking to each other – they'd cheerfully impose licensing, monitoring, and identity disclosure requirements on talking to the person sitting next to you on the bus if there was any practicable means of doing so. Don't give these ghouls the benefit of the doubt.

Weighing in at up to 700 pounds, the elk stands as one of the biggest deer species on earth. But don’t think that just because an elk is large that it’s slow. A mature bull can run as fast as 40 miles per hour – they’ve even been able to outrun horses in short races.

unfortunately i Do feel better when i clean my living space and eat enough fruits and veggies and go outside and generally remember i am a mammal :| real pity that knowing this does not make it easier to do those things

i don't understand transformation stories where they eventually become human again. why would they do that? who would ever want to be a human????

I'm not sure how much people are talking about Aaron Bushnell having engaged with online leftist media, but the records show that they were a viewer of a bunch of different twitch streams, including mine, and subscribed to a bunch of patreons, including mine. I'm not going to inflate my importance here, the livestream link was sent directly to Talia Jane and Anark, so those are probably the voices Bushnell felt the most connected to and followed the most directly, like idk if they also subscribed to someone's patreon after watching a video abt Cars 2 or whatever, I'm not trying to examine whether social media drove the self immolation because I think that's disrespectful to the memory of someone who literally died screaming Free Palestine. I don't personally know of any leftist creators who directly advocate political suicide, and I know that we all share in the political understanding that underscored Bushnell's decision.

I've already made a point of telling my patreon server that my politics are about growing into each other and supporting one another and that if anyone asked me if I thought they should do what Bushnell did I would say no absolutely not.

I'm ruminating a bit on the nature and meaning of the protest, because a lot of people are engaging with the image of a man in fatigues on fire, standing proud and declaring "FREE PALESTINE", while I've seen others talking about the fact Bushnell's username on several platforms was LillyAnarKitty, mourning the loss of a potential trans sister, talking in depressive terms about the act of suicide, to which I think the people who are engaging in the more macho interpretation of the protest are saying "no it was cool and masculine, it wasn't suicide in the conventional sense it was about principle!" I think there's room for plenty of both. For the record LillyAnarKitty used he and she pronouns in discord servers.

Andreas Malm's approach to self-sacrifice and self-endangerment is that we as subjects of the imperial core are in a sense, precious. Valuable. We are supposedly what it is all for. The imperialist project must be doing it for the citizens of the imperialist nations because if it isn't, then it has to nakedly admit that it is doing it all for the intense power and wealth consolidation of a tiny tiny number of soulless ghouls. Therefore when we put ourselves in harm's way in a way that says you would have to destroy me to get to the thing I care about, we leverage the implicit value of ourselves for our principles. A planned protest by Palestine Action against the London Stock Exchange was allegedly going to involve locking the actionists' necks onto the mechanism of the door into the LSE making it impossible to enter or leave without probably killing them, for example. I think that Bushnell's self immolation sits on a sort of dissonance, my life is precious and my life is worthless. My life is precious and so you should care about the obvious tragedy that I am enacting and my life is worthless if thousands upon thousands of Palestinians are killed as part of the project that enables the life that I lead.

There is also the way that people have debated the meaning of "complicit in genocide" - Bushnell worked in USAF Intelligence and the US has active troops in Palestine, it's possible that they were already culpable in an unknowable number of deaths without having set foot there.

In one sense it's a little pointless to debate the fine details of the meaning of Bushnell's protest in the same way that it's pointless to pick over any feelings of responsibility that I and I know other people that we know they watched are feeling. When I first saw the video I was struck by the language, by their concise and astute analysis and I knew, without knowing just how closely that they were plugged into the same intellectual and political milieu as us. In that same sense I think that they already described what they did the best that any of us are going to be able to:

“My name is Aaron Bushnell. I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide.”

“I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

"Free Palestine."

So, y'all know what's happening with Photomatt now, right?

He's being lovebombed by transphobes, overloaded with supportive messages, and sent links to anti-trans articles and podcasts and videos and newspaper columns. He's being told about the toxic TRAs and cancel culture censorship and the violent trans activists who "eat their own".

Sympathic lips are telling him all about "children being sterilised", about "unfairness in women's sports", about autogynephilia, about Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, about "gay conversion therapy".

And because he's angry, bitter, and has had his ego bruised, he is listening.

He's been in the rare position of a CEO actually subjected to a similar treatment as the people using his service, and he did not care for it. He feels uniquely hounded, he feels alone, he feels deeply wronged. He was an Ally, he did and said all the Right Things. And even still, he was Cancelled, labelled a transphobe.

I don't want to predict the future or guess to Matt Mullenweg's character. I genuinely, deeply hope I'm wrong here. However, if within the next few months, he starts expressing some "legitimate concerns" with trans rights, I will not be the least bit surprised.

lets all be REAL clear here avery was banned because a TERF harrassment campaign was successful, the ex post facto excuse of "death threats" was and i cannot stress this enough a transparent attempt from a corperate management system to Hide and Deflect from the fact that there was, is, and it seems will Remain, a HUGE gaping flaw in their moderation. an Excuse from a CEO who knows that, if he admits there IS a problem, then he and his company are Legally On The Hook for YEARS of discrimination.

seriously tho the most frustrating thing about the last few days is everyone acting like what happened to predstrogen was unique. trans women get nuked all the time.

my fiancée got nuked this morning. she hasnt made any death threats against the ceo. she hasnt posted pictures, much less sexually explicit ones. but there wont be a massive outpouring of support for her.

to most people, her blog being nuked will go entirely unnoticed by the wider site, just like the last two times it happened to her, just like the last 4 times it happened to me, just like its happened to many of my mutuals.

i need y'all to reckon with the fact that we are constantly disappearing. if predstrogen was the first time you noticed it, that's a problem you need to fix.

and predstrogen was lucky. she had people who noticed and cared and stood up for her, and from the sound of her last post thats been going around, getting off tumblr will be a good thing for her health

most of us arent that lucky. we're not popular, we dont have people who will stand up for us, and we dont have community anywhere else to turn to if this site becomes untenable.

think about that. sit with that. reckon with that. feel something

Dungeon Meshi cast in order of weirdness:

Chilchuck - Chilchuck is just a regular dude. obvs he has a degree of weirdness due to being (presumably??) a career adventurer but i think if you took him out of that setting he'd just be a regular & chill guy

Senshi - Senshi is eccentric moreso than weird. i think if he really wanted to he could go above ground and socialise and act like a regular guy. he is simply choosing not to do that.

Marcille - Marcille thinks she is the one normal person in the group. she is wrong.

Laios - jesus fuck where do i start

thought they needed a little reminder that they still have far more to lose if they double down on this stupidity. spread the word, it seems they're... very forgetful about this.

You know, historically, one of the big reasons that centralised social media was able to eclipse self-hosted forums so readily is that people wanted to get away from the constant Damoclean peril of the local boy-king flipping his shit and going on a banning spree every time someone mildly criticised him. When folks wax nostalgic for Web 1.0, I'm reasonably certain this isn't what they mean!