Lost In a Never Ending Void

I just love that this was a job.

First thought

Andy Samberg Shares His Rejected Golden Globes Jokes.

I love him so much

me, going for a long car ride: yes I can listen to so much music

In 1969, a group of children sat down to a free breakfast before school. On the menu: chocolate milk, eggs, meat, cereal and fresh oranges. The scene wouldn’t be out of place in a school cafeteria these days—but the federal government wasn’t providing the food. Instead, breakfast was served thanks to the Black Panther Party.

At the time, the militant black nationalist party was vilified in the news media and feared by those intimidated by its message of black power and its commitment to ending police brutality and the subjugation of black Americans. But for students eating breakfast, the Black Panthers’ politics were less interesting than the meals they were providing.

“The children, many of whom had never eaten breakfast before the Panthers started their program,” the Sun Reporterwrote, “think the Panthers are ‘groovy’ and ‘very nice’ for doing this for them.”

The program may have been groovy, but its purpose was to fuel revolution by encouraging black people’s survival. From 1969 through the early 1970s, the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast for School Children Program fed tens of thousands of hungry kids. It was just one facet of a wealth of social programs created by the party—and it helped contribute to the existence of federal free breakfast programs today.

When Black Panther Party founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the party in 1966, their goal was to end police brutality in Oakland. But a faction of the Civil Rights Movement led by SNCC member Stokeley Carmichael began calling for the uplift and self-determination of African-Americans, and soon black power was part of their platform.

At first, the Black Panther Party primarily organized neighborhood police patrols that took advantage of open-carry laws, but over time its mandate expanded to include social programs, too.

Free Breakfast For School Children was one of the most effective. It began in January 1969 at an Episcopal church in Oakland, and within weeks it went from feeding a handful of kids to hundreds. The program was simple: party members and volunteers went to local grocery stores to solicit donations, consulted with nutritionists on healthful breakfast options for children, and prepared and served the food free of charge.

School officials immediately reported results in kids who had free breakfast before school. “The school principal came down and told us how different the children were,” Ruth Beckford, a parishioner who helped with the program, said later. “They weren’t falling asleep in class, they weren’t crying with stomach cramps.”

Soon, the program had been embraced by party outposts nationwide. At its peak, the Black Panther Party fed thousands of children per day in at least 45 programs. (Food wasn’t the only part of the BPP’s social programs; they expanded to cover everything from free medical clinics to community ambulance services and legal clinics.)

For the party, it was an opportunity to counter its increasingly negative image in the public consciousness—an image of intimidating Afroed black men holding guns—while addressing a critical community need. “I mean, nobody can argue with free grits,” said filmmaker Roger Guenveur Smith in A Huey P. Newton Story, a 2001 film in which he portrays Newton.

Free food seemed relatively innocuous, but not to FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, who loathed the Black Panther Party and declared war against them in 1969. He called the program “potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for,” and gave carte blanche to law enforcement to destroy it.

The results were swift and devastating. FBI agents went door-to-door in cities like Richmond, Virginia, telling parents that BPP members would teach their children racism. In San Francisco, writes historian Franziska Meister, parents were told the food was infected with venereal disease; sites in Oakland and Baltimore were raided by officers who harassed BPP members in front of terrified children, and participating children were photographed by Chicago police.

“The night before [the first breakfast program in Chicago] was supposed to open,” a female Panther told historian Nik Heynan, “the Chicago police broke into the church and mashed up all the food and urinated on it.”

Ultimately, these and other efforts to destroy the Black Panthers broke up the program. In the end, though, the public visibility of the Panthers’ breakfast programs put pressure on political leaders to feed children before school. The result of thousands of American children becoming accustomed to free breakfast, former party member Norma Amour Mtume told Eater, was the government expanded its own school food programs.

Though the USDA had piloted free breakfast efforts since the mid 1960s, the program only took off in the early 1970s—right around the time the Black Panthers’ programs were dismantled. In 1975, the School Breakfast Program was permanently authorized. Today, it helps feed over 14.57 million children before school—and without the radical actions of the Black Panthers, it may never have happened.

yesterday one of my coworkers came in saying ‘did you know the president is giving James Patterson a medal’ and we all started yelling

Why do we hate Patterson? I mean, I’m down to hate him but I wanna know why

Sure! I wasn’t expecting this to get traction so I didn’t go into detail.

‘Ghostwriter sweatshop’ isn’t a perfect term - I believe the term typically used is co-writers, although I’m not sure that’s fair either. What happens is that Patterson gives writers an outline and a plot, and they write the books. He’ll read and sometimes revise what they produce. Here’s one of several articles on it. Some people have used text analysis tools to confirm that his books tend to read far more like the co-writers than him - ‘author’ may not be the best word for his role. He’s more like the director. 

That being said, many librarians don’t resent him for that. We resent him because, if you work in a public library, he has probably taken over an entire library shelf by now, maybe two. Shelf space is valuable, but when it’s a bestseller you have to buy copies, even if there’s better stuff you could be purchasing. 

I work in a library and literally we all dislike Patterson to varying degrees.

Just the other day I was shifting all the books (because we had just weeded) and I was desperately trying to fit the Pattersons on the shelves and there were no patrons in the library so I yelled “PATTERSON NEEDS TO STOP WRITING ALREADY” and my coworker—not missing a beat or even looking up from what she’s doing—just deadpans back, “He already did.”

So yeah librarians and library employees generally tend to hate Patterson.

I work at Barnes & Noble and for the holiday season James Patterson is putting up $180,000 (at least that’s the number my boss gave) of his own money for a window display competition. Employees submit a design to their store and if they win they get $300 (apparently $180,000 divided by every B&N in the country is $300) and their display put up.

And once again we all must be torn because $300 could be huge for a lot of employees and that is, objectively, rather generous. But how much of that is money he made off other authors’ writing? And how much money did those ghostwriters make for their hard work? Almost certainly not enough to casually offer $180,000 for self promotion.

Also apparently he did a book signing at our store and was not very nice :/

its true that crying wont solve things but we dont cry to solve. we cry to release

Taking the lid off a pot that’s boiling too much wont solve the problem of the heat being too high, but it will release the pressure so you’ll have time to get the heat under control before everything inside the pot explodes 

Spiderverse (April 8, 2022)

The brain is just 8 lbs of meat that sits in complete darkness and plays a video game of what it thinks is the most realistic thing ever.

it’s 3lbs, not 8. also it’s not really meat, it’s mostly fat with some water and salt. You have a wad of soggy bacon inside your skull. And this blob of gross unprocessed jello somehow manages to run a complex biomechanical suit using less electricity than it takes to work a lightbulb. And people wonder why humans are so fucking weird and have odd experiences that aren’t actually real. I mean, if a bowl of tapioca pudding managed to hallucinate so vividly it invented calculus, it also going “dude, i heard a weird noise and i’m 100% sure it was the ghost of the neighbor’s cat which hasn’t actually died yet” would be just as expected as anything else.

Omfg dying

honestly i never get tired of the whole 29 knuts to a sickle, 17 sickles to a galleon money system in harry potter

is it ridiculous? yes! is it a parody of old money where there were 12 pence to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound, but also halfpennies were used as well as the guinea, which was worth 21 shillings for some reason, and also the farthing which was ¼ of a penny…i cannot believe we used this system until the freaking 70s

When you’re so eager to mansplain the joke goes right over your head.  

If I ever turned invisible the first thing I’d do is go to France and beat up a mime. Everyone would think he is the greatest performer to ever live.

actually if you were invisible the first thing you’d do is go blind because no light would hit your eyes it would just go through them

so being invisible would suck

you must be fun at parties

Art by  CottonValent

not to be that dumb theatre ho but, to this day it still upsets me to see the same general shallow commentary on hamilton being rehashed because of the cringey parts of its fandom.

of course hamilton isnt a perfect musical, but many people seem to forget about the part where a puerto rican man decided to reapropriate an inspiring american narrative he discovered in a biography and gave it to dozens and dozens of other PoC (many of whose careers immensely profited from the unusual spotlight) in a usually predominantly white scene, and in the process created over 2 hours of absolute bangers after bangers which overall form a satisfying and emotional story, all of that topped with great acting and a genuine love for the arts.

Can we please stop pretending that all Hamilton created was (mostly white, mostly teenaged) kids “stanning” hideously racist old white dudes. Lin-Manuel gets tweets from POC saying “my kid had the confidence to go for school production because they saw someone who looked like them in a leading role in Hamilton.”

Stop fucking pretending that Lin-Manuel’s legacy is cringey white kids “stanning my trash son Jefferson uwu” you racist-ass motherfuckers. Hamilton fans are also POC that are so grateful and happy to see themselves on the stage, and love that A BROADWAY MUSICAL is so wonderfully and unapologetically not white.

As a longtime theatrical person (who is xerself white), I feel like Hamilton is, easily, the RENT of the 2010s.

RENT reinvented much of Broadway—Jon Larson’s insistence on $20 “lottery” seats for the two front rows allowed broke college kids, low-income families, and budgeted-to-death folks to enjoy real live theatre for the first time (a concept other shows, including Hamilton, have adopted). This is also how the really classist “theatre dress” concept started to break down—you could toss out one kid in jeans and a tee shirt, but what did you do when half the theatre was kids in jeans and tee shirts? RENT also drew attention to the then-contemporary and very large intersectional problem of poverty-meets-AIDS, and actually won awards for its sympathetic and complex portrayal of HIV/AIDS-positive folks.

We also saw a move away from the Hammerstein/Sondheim/Webber model following RENT; while all of these composers have their merits, RENT showed that a relative unknown, not from a rich or classically-trained background, could produce an amazing show not bound by classical music styles and leitmotifs. How much did this change things? Enough that Avenue Q and Wicked might have existed without RENT, but Hadestown, Great Comet Of 1812, and, yes, Hamilton, probably wouldn’t have, at least not in such a way that we could all enjoy them. Imagine a world where Broadway was nothing but Disney, jukebox musicals, 1960s revivals, and Phantom of the Opera. Depressing, no?

What RENT did for broke-ass students, Hamilton did for actors of color: it challenged the concept, down to its very bones, that “urban” music styles can’t be theatrical and generative (consider Hamilton’s rap battles in Congress and the showtunes/R&B mashup that is Schuyler Sisters, for example—will anybody argue that these aren’t great theatrical moments that also show off genres usually associated with people of color?), and that people of color aren’t “expressive enough” or “don’t show well enough on stage” to be cast in major, non-tokenized roles.

Further, it provided a rich wealth of quotes that ensure it a place in long-term theatrical canon; my favorite is “and when my time is up, have I done enough? Will they tell my story?”, but there are easily half a dozen more WHAM lines like that I can think of. That means that for a long, long, LONG time, the show that will define the latter half of the 2010s (if not the whole decade) in terms of Broadway theatre is a show in which every role except King George went to an actor of color, many if not most of them Black—and not an Uncle Tom, magical negro, or Mammy among them. All just….PEOPLE, playing roles of dignity and humanity.

Like RENT in the 1990s, and HAIR in the 1970s, and Porgy and Bess in the 1930s where it all began, Hamilton rewrote a very basic tenet of theatre. History has its eyes on Hamilton, and the legacy it has created.

I’m putting my foot down, if you don’t Know you’re flirting you’re not Flirting. Flirting requires knowledge and intent. If you’re not doing it on purpose you’re just bantering. I will die on this hill, yes.

I always feel like people think I’m flirting and that makes me feel unsafe. this makes me feel like I have some agency and that I can just kinda say, “no, flirting requires forethought. we’re just talking and I’m being nice.”

SAY THIS LOUDER