more good news from tiktok: they’ve started blocking celebrities.

they’re calling it block party 2024. just blocking and ignoring countless celebrities who havent said shit about palestine. influencers, actors, anyone who went to the met gala, whatever, they’re getting blocked. and people keep talking about how cathartic it is, how good it feels, how they never realized they could DO that. there was some kind of subconscious law against blocking famous people, but it’s broken, and people are LOVING it. and it’s WORKING. a social media/digital advertising coordinator was talking about how ad companies are PANICKING, because they can’t accurately target anymore. so many big influencers, including fucking LIZZO started talking about palestine the MOMENT their follower counts started going down. and the best part? no one is forgiving them. lizzo posted a tiktok asking people to donate to palestinian families, and all the comments just said you’re a multimillionaire. put your money where your mouth is. blocked.

i feel like i’m witnessing the downfall of celebrity culture, right here right now. people are waking up.

As above, so below

Mamenchisaurus, Jiangjunosaurus, Sericipterus.

Patreon • Ko-fi • Facebook  • Twitter • Prints & Merch  

no but the way malloy wrote solo from octet. we have two lonely people who are so desperate to find human connections that their entire DILEMMA is to figure out if they want to succumb to the most disgusting, misogynistic gender roles just so they can be loved by someone else? karly as a women hating that she feels like she has to objectify herself to feel loved by a man while ed as a man hates that he's so close to joining incel groups because he's desperate to feel less lonely? the way that solo is an entire song commentary on how the internet allows for the reinforcement of misogyny and how people who, despite knowing better, fall for its pitfalls because we are LONELY? like holy shit dave malloy

May 11th: Greta Thunberg among several activists arrested during a pro-Palestine protest outside the Eurovision arena, Malmö.

Via @vpressfeldt on twitter

no piece of teen media has ever accurately depicted the quiet psychological warfare of bullying. bullies on TV are always dumb brutes and not the evil geniuses of emotional manipulation that they are in real life. being given a wedgie and having your lunch money stolen is nothing in comparison to a classmate quietly creating a taboo against speaking to you that they intend to enforce against all the other kids. it’s nothing like continuous cutting comments from people you thought were being nice to you. that way that the work of one kid can make you feel like every person on earth silently hates you and that you are dirty, disgusting, worthless, creepy and useless. that you can have friends but many of them will not speak to you at school for fear of the social consequences on their end. how that damage lasts in any social setting for the rest of your life

‘The grave of the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke in Novodevichye Cemetery in Moscow is surmounted by a stone on which is engraved a rest beneath a fermata with a triple forte noted at the bottom: A very, very loud extended silence.’

- John Biguenet, Silence (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p.49.

You can just be a girl

You can just be a girl. Or a boy, or something else; those aren’t my areas of expertise, though I imagine the process is roughly similar. But you can just be a girl. If you want to. If you’re not already.

You can grow out your hair. You can try new clothes. You can take that stumbling first step into something new. You can have your awkward teen years in your 20s, your 30s, your 40s, your 50s, and on. You can never arrive late, as long as you still arrive.

You can throw away all the things you were told were gifts but which never brought you any joy. You can finally give yourself what you actually wanted but were told to never ask for.

You can drop the act. You can dismantle the walls you were taught to build. You can pick at the callous you formed around yourself to protect from the friction of the world, peel it away to find yourself soft beneath, and discover the relief of being tender. You can find sisterhood, and feel it fill all the empty promises brotherhood made before. You can have love, and you can finally give it too. You can delight in how the world seems frictionless now that you don’t have to pretend anymore.

You can melt your flesh down and recast your body into a home instead of just a tool. You can listen to every stitch pop as you rip yourself from the social fabric, free to weave yourself anew. You can rend yourself open, reach in, and gently raise the girl you could have been before you were taught to be a man. You can shed the false self you hid inside, claw your way out sticky and bloody and gasping for air, and finally start living. With freshly soft hands you can seize the hammer of your will, and with it — day by day, blow by screaming blow — you can beat your fate into a shape of your choosing.

You can just be a girl.

you may think your only options are

but in fact you can

cannot recommend more putting secrets and hints in your creative work that you dont expect anyone to figure out

i have hired this fucking thing to stare at you

bro I hate how conspiratorial people are rn like I'm not even talking about Qanon people and other like dedicated conspiracy theorists I just mean like how the thought processes have seeped their way into the brains of average everyday people, many of whom are young and left-leaning.

Like bumble recently put up these billboards in LA

which is kinda lame like I'm not gonna act like this is some kind of genius marketing. But the number of people I've seen saying these billboards are propaganda against the 4B movement???? Girl what the fuck are you talking about 4B isn't even that big a thing in Korea let alone in the US there is no way that was even a consideration for them when making this. I saw another person throwing out that this is in response to low birth rates. Like she literally said this bumble ad is supposed to be propaganda to trick women of color into having more babies so that the elites can have enough low wage workers to keep the economy going I am dead serious.

Like it is so frustrating to scroll through a feed of hot takes where people come up with sociopolitical analysis for every circumstance and the only reasnable response to their video is "no it fucking isn't????"

The answer to your problems is self-discipline

she has a flower for you!

when my brother and i were kids we got in trouble for using the term "dadding" to mean making a promise you have no intent to follow thru on which is a testament to this country's disdain for creative types

One of the problems with open source software is it's very often got deep-baked-in features that one developer one time thought were really useful to their specific and idiosyncratic use case of that software, written in a way that no other developer can understand to disentangle, debug or make good for anyone else.

A lot of these developers worked on Firefox. In my time since stopping using Chrome, I've become less and less sure they ever truly worked together.

Oh Andrei