our sun cleric's boyfriend somehow being a himbo with a high intelligence

employers tell you to "do your job" and "not get distracted" because they're trying to hide the truth from you: right now, somewhere in the world, there are girls on the computer

It is ridiculous how much grocery prices have increased

Pin for survivors

Genuinely 90% of historical fiction would be so much better if more writers could get more comfortable with the fact that to create a good story set in a different time period you do actually have to give the characters beliefs & values which reflect that time period

#even if they share your values they would phrase things differently. ‘​I hate to see a man hanged for it’ vs ‘love is love’ (via @aurpiment)

I think a cocaine addiction is more ethical than owning four homes in the new york metro area.

A Deer of Nine Colors by danlin zhang

stardust

I'm gonna link to the animations in case y'all either don't remember or have never heard of some of these.

A quick note: these were made in the 2000s. Comedy is subjective, there's some strong examples of dark and/or "lolz teh random" humor in these. Maybe some cultural blindness, too. That said, enjoy a time capsule of stuff made before/during the birth of Youtube, now hosted on Youtube.

Kenya

Salad Fingers, episode 2

End of Ze World

Schfifty Five

The Hamster Dance

Badgers

"Rejected" by Don Hertzfeldt

Charlie the Unicorn

The Llama Song

Peanut Butter Jelly Time

Blessing your timeline

Whenever I see a post talking about how it's okay to steal from huge corporations, when they have shit like self checkout, I always want to jump up and say they have cameras and are collecting your information and you need to be so careful because yeah like they're inflating the prices and running monopolies and price fixing with competitors but everybody is caring about shoplifters more and that's really fucked up, but you also need to consider that Target might be keeping track of every time you don't scan something or intentionally scan it wrong, and just waiting for it to add up to a felony.

Which feels entirely beside the point and almost inappropriate to bring up when the point is that the customer is already a victim of theft, but I feel like there are people encouraging others to do stuff that can absolutely end up with them in jail without mentioning at all that it's a risk.

This is real and here are some sources discussing facial recognition in various retail settings. fuck corporations but also go in knowing all the facts 🫡 Kashmir Hill is a great journalist who’s entire beat is facial recognition and how it’s deployed, and she’s an amazing resource if you want to learn more about facial recognition in general. highly recommend her new book on clearview ai too, it’s a great read

ACLU lawsuit that stops clearview from being sold to retail in the us (but doesn’t stop retail from buying other facial recognition tech) https://www.aclu.org/cases/aclu-v-clearview-ai

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/technology/facial-recognition-stores.html

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/barred-from-grocery-stores-by-facial-recognition/

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/barred-from-grocery-stores-by-facial-recognition/

Targets privacy policy, scroll down to the camera section

You are the coolest person in the world to me for finding all those sources.

Also, I really want to add this, because I didn't know until my mom happened to see it, but Target has their own privately funded forensics team.

Literally. They have their own CSI style unit that specifically is for tracking theft, but is so well funded and capable that they've helped solve actual non-retail crimes.

So, like, the OP is not kidding when they say that corporations like Target are straight up waiting for shit to add up to felony crimes. They are and they have the technology to do it.

On Discomfort and Morality

My father finds gay men uncomfortable.

He's told me before that it's like a knee-jerk for him. Something he doesn't consciously control. He sees two men behaving romantically, and his body reacts with mild discomfort.

In the 1960s, when he was in high school, most of the boys in his form thought he was gay on the simple fact that he wasn't homophobic. He wouldn't participate in insulting queer people, he didn't care if someone was gay, he wouldn't have a problem hanging out with gay people. So people thought he was gay. That's how prevalent homophobia was in his formative years.

When I was 10, my dad told me very seriously that Holmes and Watson were gay. That it was obvious from the literature and the time period that they were meant to be a gay couple. When I was 14 and I came out to my parents as bi, when my mum was upset my dad ripped into her for it. Told her that she was being stupid, that it was my life to live how I wanted to and that she needed to get over herself.

My dad formed my views on censorship: that being that it was completely ridiculous and thoroughly evil. He didn't believe in censorship of any kind. If I asked him a question about sex, he answered it honestly. When I was 12 and I asked him about homosexuality, still young and uncertain, he told me that there was nothing wrong with it. That it was just how some people were. That there was likely an evolutionary reason for it. And that for some people it was uncomfortable on an instinctual level.

He taught me that just because you're uncomfortable with something, doesn't make it wrong. He also taught me that most people don't understand this.

I see a lot of this on the internet as of the last few years. The anti shipping movement, the terf movement, the anti ace movement. It all stems from discomfort that people have crossed wires into believing means wrong. Really every -ism and -phobia out there stems from this same fundamental aspect of humanity.

The next time you see something and you automatically think it's disgusting, or wrong, or immoral, I invite you to ask yourself: is this actually wrong or does this just make me uncomfortable?

"The hidden rain village"

I'm detecting a DEEPLY CONCERNING lack of TRINKETS in this household!

Continually filling your mutual's dash with your blorbo like some sort of missionary trying to convert them