for several weeks now this tweet has been causing wars on twitter

its important to do this every time a museum or school thinks this is a good idea

Did you intentionally make him Cajun before that screencap or was that baked into the prompt already. I ask only because the eyes as green as the bayou got me good

he's naturally australian so i gave him an upgrade

just another ten million dollar bump in the police budget, please one more funding increase so we can create a real life counter-strike map based on the over-policed majority black neighborhoods we do no-knock raids in every week, just one final municipal service defunding, we just need to shut down the libraries earlier and fire half of our public school teachers, please the police need one final additional million dollar cash injection and they'll finally stop racially profiling minorities, i swear, one final billion dollar statewide cut to road maintenance and the police will stop throwing flashbangs into the cribs of sleeping infants

PSA: the guardian is not working on a hit piece on diy hrt, and claims they are are misinformation

on the 18th, this post appeared on 4chan's /lgbt/ (slurs in thread: link). a screenshot was posted to reddit, then to tumblr. you've probably seen it:

today, the 23rd, another screenshot popped up on various discord servers, then was reposted variously to twitter. it shows a supposed email from guardian journalist and notorious TERF Susanna Rustin, claiming as the original 4chan post does.

it's now been shared around, and it's with good intentions. the message is useful: don't share your personal information or medical data with journalists, especially ones that happen to be TERFs.

but the post does this through misinformation and fearmongering. i'm still waiting on my response by email from Rustin, but she's reiterated twice (once, twice) that she did not write the email and is not working on such a story. on the 19th, i talked to other guardian newsroom journalists, who said they also did not know of a story's existence.

the moral of the story: this is misinformation, and it's dangerous. it spreads a fine message here, but it does it through spreading anxiety and terror.

you can follow along with this post on my parallel thread on twitter. also calling on @wakewithgiggli to delete their original post!

pixiv banning r18 material in the us/uk is bad. really bad

i shouldn't need to tell you why this is concerning

also

columbia administration is threatening to call in the national guard tonight

The 1944 G.I. Bill signed by Franklin Roosevelt included a free college benefit almost as an afterthought, since academic and political leaders thought that most returning troops wouldn’t be “college material,” in an era when only 5% of Americans earned bachelor’s degrees and a majority didn’t finish high school. Instead, the mostly working-class G.I. Bill recipients stunned the nation both in their large numbers and their devotion to taking classes. [...]

Top officials seemed less worried about the uproar at elite campuses like Columbia and more concerned about radicalism at the massive state universities —Berkeley or New York State’s university at Buffalo — that had exploded with working-class kids taking advantage of low (or free) tuition. They also nervously eyed rising enrollment and protests at HBCUs like Mississippi’s Jackson State University, where cops would murder two Black students on May 15, 1970.

Kent State skyrocketed from 5,000 students in 1954 to 21,000 by 1966, many of them kids of factory workers whose idealism had been forged in the New Deal-era union activism. By 1970, students exhausted by watching their neighbors return from Vietnam in body bags gravitated toward radical groups like Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS. The final trigger was then-President Nixon sending U.S. troops into Cambodia, which led to Kent State protesters burning down the ROTC building, which caused Ohio’s governor to call up the National Guard.

Today, polls show most people who know about the May 4 shooting consider it an abuse of government power, but it didn’t look that way to Middle America in 1970. An instant Gallup Poll showed 58% of Americans blamed the students for the bloodshed, with only 11% blaming the Guard. At a memorial service in Kent, locals disrupted the event chanting “Kent State Four! Should have studied more!” [...]

That year, a Hoover Institution economist who advised both Nixon and Reagan named Roger Freeman said the quiet part out loud when he told the San Francisco Chronicle, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through higher education.” [...]

After Reagan was elected president in 1980, he slashed direct federal aid to college students and accelerated the shift to a model based around student loans. Meanwhile, the state legislatures that had spent generously on new dorms in the 1960s now put higher education on the chopping block. In Pennsylvania, taxpayers who paid 75% of the cost of public universities in the late 20th century now pay 25%. That gap is filled in by the state’s working families paying more tuition, which invariably means taking out student loans.

Hundreds of Jewish anti-war demonstrators have been arrested during a Passover seder that doubled as a protest in New York, as they shut down a major thoroughfare to pray for a ceasefire and urge the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, to end US military aid to Israel.

The 300 or so arrests took place on Tuesday night at Grand Army Plaza, on the doorstep of Schumer’s Brooklyn residence, where thousands of mostly Jewish New Yorkers gathered for the seder, a ritual that marked the second night of the holiday celebrated as a festival of freedom by Jews worldwide.

The seder came just before the US Senate resoundingly passed a military package that includes $26bn for Israel.

the Columbia University arrests are worse than they seem. They're arresting protesting students for trespassing. It goes without saying students cannot meaningfully "trespass" in the common areas of a university they attend. So Columbia University has suspended all student protestors from their institution, in the process revoking their access to housing, their belonging, and most crucially damaging their academic futures. We are witnessing full scale silencing and removal of anyone of conscience from the next generation of academia.

beyond that the columbia common is literally an open space during the day; the gates are open and it's possible to pass through it like you'd pass through a regular block. even after my student ID expired i was still able to walk through the commons bc ID is not requested until you enter an actual building. it's quite common to see parents, toddlers, and such who are clearly not enrolled just hanging out. so not only were the students not trespassing at a SCHOOL THEY PAY FOR, there was also not a precedent for non-students to be disallowed from the grass and walkways.

It's not the first time that has happened

This actively happened in my lifetime, and I’m in my 30s. A lot of us experienced it in real time and no one stopped it. No one helped us.

When I was 16 we would hang out outside and inside the library. We ranged from a group of 20 to a group of 3-4 people on any given day, because us 16 year olds also hung out with whatever other kid was around the area. (Mostly younger siblings and then their friends.) We never did anything wrong, never mind illegal. We were never loud in the library and were always polite to the staff. We sometimes got a little loud outside on the street when there was some contest thing going on, but not very often. We mostly hung out and talked about stuff going on in our lives.

Then one day someone called the cops on us.

And the cops showed up all ready angry, then started yelling at us for doing nothing. They couldn’t even come up with a real reason to be there yelling at us, other than to demand to know if we were a ‘gang’. When one of my friends started crying, I turned to tell her that it would be ok. The cop grabbed me, screamed at me to not look away when he was talking to me, then demand I get in the cop car and go down to the station. It took almost an hour for my mother to find out where I was because I didn’t have a cellphone at the time and the cops had just fucking kidnapped me. For comforting a friend while they screamed at us. And you know what happened?

We never hung out like that again. None of us. We all got banned from the library for a year. Again, all of this for literally no reason. They told us we were ‘misbehaving’ for simply hanging around outside being kids. And then we had no where to go. Some of those kids were forced back into their abusive homes. I literally never saw half of them again. Ever. And I lived in that town for several years after that.

So, yeah. They just started kicking us out from the outside years ago and not a single adult or group of adults gave a shit.

the circus was in town that day 🤡

happy lesbian visibility week to them

Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America

by Matthew Olzmann

Tell me what it’s like to live without

curiosity, without awe. To sail

on clear water, rolling your eyes

at the kelp reefs swaying

beneath you, ignoring the flicker

of mermaid scales in the mist,

looking at the world and feeling

only boredom. To stand

on the precipice of some wild valley,

the eagles circling, a herd of caribou

booming below, and to yawn

with indifference. To discover

something primordial and holy.

To have the smell of the earth

welcome you to everywhere.

To take it all in, and then,

to reach for your knife.

I am a solo indie dev trying to overcome my anxiety and actually let people know my game exists. It is a cute physics based game where you are the level.

I love making this game with passion and I am so excited to share it with the world, but somehow I need to let the world know. Unfortunately the way steam works is the more wishlists the more visibility, so if you are interested it is super appreciated :)

Wishlist on steam or visit the website to find out more mightymarbles.com