shit lets tumblr yall

democrats: "george bush is a criminal"

democrat gets elected → nothing happens to bush

republicans: "barack obama is a criminal"

republican gets elected → nothing happens to obama

democrats: "donald trump is a criminal"

democrat gets elected → nothing happens to trump

republicans: "joe biden is a criminal"

republican gets reelected → nothing happens to biden

rinse and repeat for eternity

I fully understand this sentiment, but I think it’s important (and more hopeful) to be pedantic and say that, actually, things happened to Trump. Because, yeah, Trump is obviously doing fine now. But:

Obviously we are neck deep in the second Trump term, so none of these attempts made a difference. But they nearly did; or, they were close to making a difference. It takes time to prosecute criminal cases like these, and the cases that were dropped were dropped because Trump was President again. The NY case, which convicted him, didn’t have time to impose a sentence before he was again a sitting president, so no punishment was imposed.

(Which of course leads to a secondary and more horrifying question of “why are Americans voting for a felon???”)

I just think it’s better for our mental health to remember the thousands of hours people spent building these cases during 2020-2024 and, in the case of the NY case, actually convicting Trump of felonies. It isn’t true that nothing will happen to you if you shamelessly break laws as President, and I expect that similar cases will start to be brought the second he’s no longer a sitting president again.

YOULL NEVER TAKE MY EM DASH

damn asker, that's crazy and would suck. good thing we have robust IP law in the United States to prevent theft from Black artists

now to take a big sip of coffee and look up who owns Tupac Shakur's likeness

Tressie McMillan Cottom’s reading list for fighting back against Big Tech. “Put simply, there is too much money, some of it too untraceable, giving a small group of unelected people too much power over the people.”

if you, like me, are hesitant to enjoy what kinda sounds like "relaxes food standards" on the surface, I'm happy to report that this isn't "everyone can do what they want with your food supply without oversight" but rather a case where in NYC you had to have a permit to sell food and a second, superfluous permit to sell frozen desserts. This action simply removes the need for the second permit, rolling it into the first permit in order to help small businesses. Yay!

Sometimes I open a fic that is just SO badly written. OOC dialogue, poor formatting, confusing grammar and punctuation.

And you know what? It makes me so happy. I’m not going to finish this fic, but I’m so pleased that somebody made it, and the barrier to entry for this art form is so low, that this person (who is probably just learning) gets the exact same space on ao3 as everybody else. No algorithm, no oversight, no proofreading. Because for a fandom to have great writers, they need an opportunity to be shitty writers first, and still have a platform and an audience.

ME/CFS is not a new illness, although there is a lot of historical evidence that, just like covid-19, the spanish flu epidemic in 1918 was followed by a mass-disabling wave of postviral syndromes that lead to the eventual naming of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

when you read Victorian novels and someone's eccentric spinster aunt is holed up in the family attic and referred to as an "invalid", that's where people with conditions like ME/CFS used to be in the social structure. the term "shut-in" was also used to refer to housebound people, whatever their reason for being housebound. these people have always been present in the world

this is actually a really good, concrete example of how just knowing stuff about history, and reading old books, can directly materially improve your quality of life. and its an experience ive had a lot because im privileged to have really intellectually curious, self-educated parents who would TELL me this stuff as a kid, and created the expectation that i would find things out for myself. im not lecturing anyone like "you need to read old boring books r your life sucks" thats not what im saying. im saying knowing concrete facts about things people think dont matter can change your life in big and small ways for the better. instead of being baffled and alienated about this subject, i have cultural context for it, i understand how it has worked in the past and can work in the present moment for me. i feel less ashamed and isolated!

i was even talking TO my dad about this a few weeks ago. and he was talking about how his wife, my stepmother, a lovely woman, was going through it a bit with some medical stuff ad she was frustrated dealing with all the recovery shit. and he said something like, "this is just a normal part of life fo everyone eventually, we used to have people we called 'invalids' in the last three centuries, people who we just took care of and weren't expected to do anything except survive and if they were lucky maybe recover. and it's not a big deal". and he's right!

but we have sort of erased this class you can inhabit from modern life, now you're just a temporarily-embarrassed Laborer, and everyone is mad at you until you recover your "wellness".

Do the AI people know that the rest of us who never got on the bandwagon are still doing everything the same way we always have

The AI boom has changed literally nothing about my day to day life except I now have to work harder to get access to reliable information, all the important admin work is being done wrong, and I keep getting DMs letting me know the perfectly ordinary and plausible photo I liked was actually a fake image generated by a fascist to generate views and churn out ad money for the purpose of funding their tree-powered puppy-flushing toilet

"But how are you living life WITHOUT Doctor Leroy's Magically Invigorating Nerve Tonic? I can't imagine getting anything done without it!" <- old-timey 1800s guy who has been drinking crank and goat piss daily for the price of a shiny nickel

My darling Ao3ers. With all this Wattpad bullshit going on and the influx of people who don't understand what no censorship actually mean, it is our solemn duty to create disturbing, disgusting, positively unseemly writing for no other reason than to piss them off and prove that we can.

Get freaky my friends.

Excerpt from this story by Earther/Gizmodo:

On Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration updated its El Niño outlook, declaring a 90% chance of a “very strong” event. In fact, leading forecast models are predicting the strongest El Niño on record, and it could offer a preview of our future climate.

A new analysis by Berkeley Earth climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, shared with The Washington Post, found a 95% chance that the combined impact of this “super” El Niño and human-driven warming will make 2027 the hottest year on record. He reportedly estimates that the global temperature could range from 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.67 degrees Celsius) to 3.33 degrees F (1.85 degrees C) above the preindustrial average next year.

At the upper end of this range, 2027’s global temperature could resemble levels the planet might not otherwise reach until around 2040—temporarily fast-forwarding the current warming trend by about 13 years, according to The Washington Post. At the lower end, we’d see temperatures resembling what’s expected by the mid-2030s.

Even El Niños of ordinary strength can significantly boost Earth’s average temperature. That’s because the sharp rise of sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean releases vast amounts of heat into the atmosphere. But this is no ordinary El Niño.

“No El Niño in the modern record has run this warm this early in its development: measured against each year’s own climatology, 2026 is now tracking above even the great 1997 and 2015 events at the same point in the year,” Hasufather and his Berkeley Earth colleague, chief scientist Robert Rohde, wrote in a July 2026 temperature update issued Thursday.

When El Niño peaks in December, sea surface temperatures are projected to be roughly 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) above average, blowing the previous record out of the water.

I collaborated with the Human Artistry Project to make this strip alongside other web cartoonists to make the point that “Stealing isn’t Innovation” when it comes to A.I. usage. It seems to be doing numbers on instagram and elsewhere, so you may also read it here, tumblr.

May the discourse that ensues be long and unhelpful.

I sure feel bad for that one IDF commander and the 5 hours of community service he gets after this.

And even that is being generous.

He probably got a promotion.

some of you need to stop psychoanalising your kinks and start doing mad scientist shit to them instead.

no more "do I enjoy being tied up because I secretly crave an excuse not to fight back against intimacy because of my mother", that is dumb and useless.

start doing shit like "what do I like about being tied up? what part of it gets me going?" and then once you have isolated the components of the kink that are the main drivers, look for all the other kinks that contain them. mix and match. get creative. experiment.