Just remember as much as humans suck, there's something in nature doing something as perverse, or as heinous. Sure, we have limited empathy, so are inclined to sometimes know better. But we generally don't know better enough.
EVOLUTION DOESN'T CARE ABOUT HAPPY
Appreciate your gut bacteria. They love you too.
Caffeine is the same thing. A poison to termites ( HUUUGE BUZZZZZZZ! ) that gives us a rush when we microdose it.
While I'm totally behind a world where Frank Zappa lives longer, the political problems of the US federal government are systemic. The Democratic party moved left out of necessity to oppose the Republican party, who has been trying to restore autocracy since the 1933 Business Plot failed, and FDR implemented the New Deal to prevent Communist revolution (because anything is better than living in cardboard boxes and eating flour paste to live.)
The card / board game Chrononauts expansion The Gore Years imagines an alternative in which the GOP delays of the Florida Recount were not successful, allowing Gore to win, but Andrew Looney posits a result of a Palin administration in 2008. To be fair, he also imagines avoiding WWII (hard to do) might create a period of European peaceful prosperity, so YMMV.
The 2024 election is an indictment not just of Americans but of the viability of democracy in a world where billionaires exists who can create disinformation campaigns that can convince the masses to make uninformed decisions against their own personal interests. In fact, the entire 20th century in the US has been a master class in how to subvert democracy, so even if we were able to reform federal elections (eliminate the EC, insert ranked choice voting or some other non-FPTP election model) elections may continue to be controlled by demagogy and massive propaganda machines.
We don't know (all of) what must be done, but we do know neither US major political parties will willingly relinquish power to move towards public serving government. Considering how much it appears someone is fucking with a time machine to meddle with the past since at least 2000, Frank Zappa may yet live again.
I am left handed and enby.
Though the correlation intersection is between enby (or peripheral to gender norms) and ASD, which is a broad intersection. It also informs my penchant for over-explaining things.
I'm not mansplaining, it's that the connectedness excites me like dinosaurs excite a toddler!
ETA Re: Anbidexterity, when I was in kindergarten I could, for a very short while, do letters with either hand and it was so cool. Then, in a playground accident, I broke my right forearm, so I learned to write while my right hand was in a cast. But yeah, I played piano (out of practice, now), and while I do mouse stuff with my left hand, I still joystick with my right hand due to early gaming on someone else's computer.
That said, for fine work or throwing, I do that with my left hand.
PSS: That all said, computer input devices come in three flavors: Right handed, ambidextrous and rare, often not great left handed devices I don't like. Usually I do ambidextrous options.
Frog frog. 🐸🐸
(Note we still only have a frog face emoji and not a full frog emoji)
Fuck Around and Find Out through the lens of The Scottish Play, so yes. Also noting that the weird sisters show up when someone's about to FA so they can watch the FO part.
An early meme that did not pass muster when I showed it to family, but it makes me giggle.
I may just be an esoteric nerd.
I'm developing a memeset of really common criticisms I have with the psychiatric sector, having been through it a lot and having expressed a lot of these as concerns to my new therapist / psychiatrist.
Speaking of which I'm freshly in therapy after a long stint without! Yay!
I keep having thoughts. Dangerous, untoward MCU Supervillain thoughts.
For instance, the reason we stopped doing outlawry ( wikipedia ) as a thing is because when you unperson someone, their only defense is to fight back and hide, and if that means a wondering child happens upon your camp, well, dead kids tell no tales.
So at the point that a given group is treated is stripped of rights enough that it threatens their life (say putting someone at risk for morbid pregnancy complications, or a homeless person needing to sleep) they are required by necessity ( wikipedia ) to defend themselves violently, since defending themselves procedurally is useless.
Which means it is right and proper for those people to stab anyone whose awareness of them and their predicament is a threat. And it's right and proper to stab the monarchists who would strip us of our rights. Looking at you SCOTUS.
Art by Erik Carnell one of the LGBT+ artists who was featured in Target during Pride and then removed thanks to white Christian nationalist pressure.
So here we are, and yeah, we need you all.
A semicolon after "youth" will help keep it clear.
Note: Most of the info here was ripped from the most recent You're Wrong About podcast ( On Buzzsprout ), Halloween History with Chelsey Weber-Smith Go! Listen! Enjoy! Tell 'em Large Marge sent ya!
Yesterday, I learned that the current American Halloween tradition of giving candy to costumed kids represents an uneasy truce between civilization and the trickster spirit.
There are a lot of traditions regarding Samhain, many of which include bonfires and naked dancing (because they all included bonfires and naked dancing. Who are we kidding?) But in the Irish farmlands, Samhain was mischief night, at least for adolescent and young adult boys (we assume they were boys.)
The idea was to haze the local grownups, particularly the crabby ones who yelled at clouds or didn't like young'uns much. There were plenty of old standby pranks: carving faces into produce or shepherding livestock to the rooftops to dressing up like ghosts and monsters and ambushing them at night to send them running.
It was a mostly accepted tradition. Teenagers got to go bananas for one day a year, and were (more or less) on ~~good~~ better behavior for the rest of the time. Skittish folk did the Purge thing of holing up in safety.
And then the Irish and their wily teenagers came to the United States.
Our Halloween pumpkin-smashers were called guisers from those in disguise. Note that there were other guising traditions that exchanged DNA with our dark cabal of malicious tricksters. (One fond one was of drunkards who'd sing at your house until you gave them food, beer or money to leave), but for our antagonists, it was the black bloc of the time, a means to ensure that you weren't identified at the scene of a fresh crime.
Do an image search of "vintage halloween costumes" and you won't see people trying to look like Mario or Misty or Mickey or Megatron, but just people in spooky clothes and spookier masks clearly up to no good. You didn't buy your costume, rather you made it with whatever was on hand, and hence there were a lot of sheet ghosts.
In the early 20th century pranking in the States achieved an apogee (a nadir?). The great depression drove everyone to despair, and wanton destruction that once was meager and required a morning of repair might be the fire that broke the farm. Also some pranks went wrong, leading to a resonance cascade failure, starting a wildfire or other unnatural disaster.
And then WWII happened and we were not only trying to salvage what we can, but had real (alleged) monsters that might even be infiltrating the homefront as we speak. Pranksters then were losing the war for the Allies and serving the Axis, even if inadvertently.
Something had to be done, and even President Truman got involved regarding The Halloween Problem.
A couple of early attempts to trade Halloween for a nicer holiday failed drastically, and the pranking continued.
Eventually an armistice came when the neighborhood spooky pageant emerged. Creative neighbors would turn a part of their house into a spooky diorama and light the path with candles and jack-o-lanterns and other Halloween kitsch. Rather than hopping onto a war-wagon (that's a mischief team stuffed into a motor vehicle) they'd go visit the local spooktaculars. (This would in turn fuel the haunted house craze, assisted by Disney's Haunted Mansion opening in 1953)
Feeding the roaming guests kept the rotten eggs away. While there was candy, there were also cookies, apples, (toothbrushes, Chick tracts) and other treats. Sometimes there were activities, though I never could figure out bobbing for apples.
The transition from free-form snacks to packaged candy came due to The Candyman who was much less exciting than the movie version. Ronald Clark O'Bryan made custom Pixy Stix laced with potassium cyanide, one of which he fed to his son, Timothy on Halloween, 1974. He was far removed from a master criminal, and inconsistencies in his story kept the police interested until it all fell apart. He was also deep in debt and took out a beefy life-insurance policy on his son. The police didn't have to investigate too deeply.
O'Bryan was executed in 1984, but by then the damage he had done to Halloween had been done, and moral panics would persist about tampered Halloween treats. By then it was common for everyone to just give packaged candy.
Related was also the 1982 Tylenol poisonings. They had nothing to do with Halloween, but secured into the public conscience that people could tamper with products in order to cause mayhem to the general public. And at least by my recollection, this not only ended all Halloween offerings of home-made cookies by kitchen-minded families but also made sure safety seals were added to every food and hygiene product in the US.
By the aughts, everyone was familiar with the "fun-sized" candy which was totally not that fun.
(It's noted by some that Tylenol doesn't really need all that much assistance to poison you. As painkillers go, it's hard on the system, easy to overdose, and Tylenol poisoning incurs a yearly body count in the US. There's been an ongoing effort to convince the FDA to rethink its approval of Tylenol, for convincing cause. But big pharma really wants to keep selling you stuff. Anyway I digress.)
These days, we hear a lot of calls from the religious right for the end of celebrations of Halloween, a holiday too macabre for families who purport to have family values. Many churches tell their parishioners to skip the holiday for Jesus, while more clever churches simply hold a party there as an alternative to trick-or-treating. Some churches forbid witches, or even only allow approved costumes from the approved costume list. There's a lot of, as Dan McClellan would put it, costly identity signaling between members of right-wing religious ministries to show they're on team-purity.
But this is not a holiday we celebrate to honor benign gods and favored spirits. This is not an Apollonian holiday we keep up for the morale of the people, rather it's a Dionysian holiday, one we celebrate in respect for spirits who would wrong us if we don't acknowledge their presence and the unsteady peace they offer in exchange for our tribute.
Hallowe'en as it is celebrated in the US is a rite we engage in every year to keep away malevolent trickster monsters, who will return (and will start fires) if we don't placate them with yearly treats.
Another Qu'ils mangent de la brioche moment.
We recently had this conversation and I realized I have new headcannon.
I was thinking Low Key Gigachad Enclave
Yes, for us, a gram of caffeine is a double-whopper of a dose (about seven cups of strong coffee). Meanwhile a termite eating caffeine-laced wood gets a dose far greater in proportion to its body weight.