It's just a model...

cant get more fascist police state than snipers on rooftops overlooking peaceful protests.

this is what democracy looks like.

I would like to share a story about my dad and health insurance and how it was pre-Obamacare.

My dad has diabetes. He also owned his own business (a plumbing business, no, the humor is not lost on me), so he paid for his own health insurance. His premium was over $800 per month. This was… 2008ish? I was in my very early 20s.

He broke a toe and didn’t realize it until it got infected and went septic. He was hospitalized for over two months. He lost the toe. Because his $800/month insurance was garbage, and because he wasn’t working and making money, he also lost his insurance. My mom and I couldn’t keep up with everything, and somehow that payment slipped through the cracks. (By one week, and then it was gone.)

When we realized, we tried to get the health insurance back. They said because he had a pre-existing condition he would have to pay his premium like normal, but had to wait two years to receive any benefits.

Let me restate that.

We had to pay $800/month for NOTHING, for TWO YEARS, while also paying almost double for all of his medical needs.

My dad still couldn’t work, but still had hospital bills (that were now even more insane), insulin, medication, not to mention other normal bills, and business related bills.

I helped out where I could, but we were pretty much broke. I remember feeling guilty for buying fresh apple juice at the grocery store, instead of the frozen concentrate. It was my birthday and I was splurging.

I know the only thing that saved us was Obamacare.

Everyone likes to shit on it for not being good enough, or a whole slew of other reasons. But we somehow got my dad under the super early roll out.

His premium dropped to $130/month, and he received benefits IMMEDIATELY. His medication, even the insulin, was suddenly affordable.

I remember bawling my eyes out in the bathroom at work because I could suddenly afford to actually buy gas instead of putting it on my credit card.

I AM NOT PUTTING UP WITH THIS BULLSHIT ANYMORE, FOR US OR ANYONE ELSE. We are moving in the wrong goddamn direction.

Fuck Trump and the GOP and anyone who votes red. This has to end.

The landlord fears the urban oyster mushroom farmer

I have seen this on every social media site and folks- if your home is damp enough to get full fruity flushes of oyster mushrooms (from stray spores from a grow bag batch), they are the LEAST of your worries. You know what doesn’t produce highly visible fruiting bodies? Most molds. And wood rot. Go ahead and grow them indoors, because they’re a canary in the coal mine if they start fruiting anywhere.

^ the above reblog right here!!! People in the notes saying "don't do this!!!" Are missing the part where people are not deliberately growing Oyster Mushrooms all over their apartment, but that the stray spores from Mushroom Growing Kits are revealing systemic dampness problems that Landlords cannot dismiss and forces them to take action.

you should grow oyster mushrooms, so if they start growing out of your walls, you will know that your walls are probably full of mold as well.

I tried a little animation of blooming flowers in old anime style, with blur and shitty resolution, hope it works as intended !

nobody's unlovable and loneliness isn't new, this just what happens when the first generation of men and boys allowed to say "I desire kindness" emerge at at same time as women and girls allowed to say "I don't owe men anything".

And they're both right, they're both correct- Masculine figures are allowed to ask to be treated gently and Feminine figures are allowed to decide who they share intimacy with.

The PROBLEM is men thinking "I deserve gentleness" is the same as "someone owes me intimacy".

Men need to start GIVING what they ask for.

If men were kinder and gentler, if we raised our boys with emotional literacy and taught them compassion and self-care and generosity, personal responsibility and concern for others, they wouldn't see WOMEN as a united monolith marching out to deny them their "right"- they'd have support networks and friendships of their own to rely on, not just a mom or a wife to dump all their needs onto.

Men being lonely isn't new. They're just allowed to talk about it now. And, coincidentally, the socially-conditioned second-class-citizen support role is rapidly vanishing.

We've yet to stabilize: its that instability that has people chewing at the rope.

It's a rough transition, but that's all it is. A step to something better.

PURR-KOUR!

The book is 1984, which is neither. It's anti-authoritarian, which tells you a lot.

Ya know, sometimes I wish the joke *didn’t* write itself.

Cat enjoying beach

(Source)

Lmao how is this real, "the ambient sounds of the world were wrong, sir"

Imagine paying Columbia-amounts of money to be taught by someone with kindergarten-level art literacy. Like, motherfucker, the wholeass point of 4’33” is to emphasize how every performance of live music is inextricably linked to the ambient sounds of the context in which it is performed!!!!!!! Paying attention to and thinking about the context of the performance is the point of the song!!!! If the point was to hear birds chirping and people walking, John Cage would have fucking recorded that instead. Insisting that art is only good when contains good things and makes you feel good things is baby-level art criticism. How the fuck is this dude a professor.

Actually I’m not done going off yet. This pisses me off so much. How can you teach the humanities and be so obstinately ignorant? Like bruh, if the chanting outside makes you feel uncomfortable and upset, maybe you should take about four and a half minutes to contemplate why you feel that way. During that time, you might consider things such as: why are there students chanting? What are they protesting? Why do they feel so strongly about this issue that they’re willing to disrupt their lives to bring attention to it? Should I also feel as strongly? Should I be protesting with them? Is my desire for silence more important than the students’ desire for justice? Why do I find the noise they’re making more upsetting than the genocide they’re protesting?

Being like “loud noise make me angy 😠” is so fundamentally incurious and baby-brained it’s honestly unbelievable

More profound when you consider that Doctors Without Borders rarely makes political statements.

In #UNSC mtg on Middle East, @MSF SG Christopher Lockyear says: "Israeli forces have attacked our convoys, detained our staff, bulldozed our vehicles, hospitals have been bombed and raided. And now for a second time, one of our staff shelters has been hit. This pattern of attacks is either intentional or indicative of reckless incompetence. Our colleagues in #Gaza are fearful that as I speak to you today, they will be punished tomorrow."

He adds: "The humanitarian response in Gaza today is an illusion. A convenient illusion that perpetuates a narrative that this war is being waged in line with international laws. Calls for humanitarian assistance have echoed across this chamber. Yet in Gaza we have less and less every day, less space, less medicine, less food, less water, less safety."

Specifically, Doctors Without Borders rarely makes political statements because doing so can jeopardize their ability to work in as many places as possible (including places controlled by incredibly shitty governments), and their one singular goal is to provide medical care wherever it's needed. They are extremely practical-minded as an organization and will, regardless of members' personal beliefs, avoid potentially offending people who have the ability to make their work more difficult/impossible. All they care about is getting doctors to the people who need the doctors. If they're doing this, it's because providing medical care in Palestine has become so difficult that calling on the global community for action gives them better odds of being able to do their jobs than avoiding offense to the Israeli government, possibly because offending the Israeli government can no longer make the situation worse than it already is.

Duck Amuck | Director: Chuck Jones | Studio: Warner Bros. | USA, 1953

NOT ME YOU SLOP ARTIST

This is a close up? A CLOSE UP YA JERK! A CLOSEUP!

Alright, let’s get this picture started! (The End) NO NOOOOO!

One of the defining moments of animation history.

“Ain’t I a stinker?”

In Babylon 5, didn’t one of the non-humans think Daffy was the god of frustration?

Holy shit, this is nearly 70 years old. This would have been right on the heels of color television being commercially available to the public.

@amayatepes look at this

LMAO

Huh. That’s just a whole ass Daffy Duck cartoon.

Everything about this cartoon is top-notch. The timing, the animation (watch Daffy’s different walks) the art; this is a treasure

HI IT’S ME AGAIN

YOU’RE FUCKING UP YOUR TEETH AND YOUR MUSCLES AND SHIT

WHEN I CATCH YOU WITH ONE OF THESE I STEAL A FEW MINUTES OF YOUR LIFE FORCE. WHEN YOU ARE NOT CLENCHING WHEN YOU SEE ONE OF THESE, YOU GET TO STEAL A FEW MINUTES BACK. WE’LL SEE WHO’S LEFT STANDING IN THE END

every person can feel freddie’s presence in their souls when they sing MAMAAAAAA UUHHHH, I DONT WANNA DIE, I SOMETIMES I WISH I’VE NEVER BEEN BORN AT ALL with all the air in their lungs i’m not joking

it’s fucking crazy to think about the amount of people who have sung bohemian rhapsody? like it’s such a unifying song, by nature of the fact that so many people know it. it holds so many good memories for me and other people. it’s a song you scream in the car with your friends while you drive around your boring hometown, it’s a song you drunkenly sing with your arm around your best friend, or a song you sing along to with strangers when it’s on in public. it’s bittersweet to think about freddie’s legacy carrying on like that through his masterpiece. freddie carries on because he’s a part of so many people’s good memories and bohemian rhapsody is a huge part of that.

Reblog if you have sung bohemian rhapsody with your friends

every time i see this post i’m reminded of the video of 65,000 people singing bohemian rhapsody in near-perfect harmony

like, what other song can make that claim?

Some of the highlights of that video include:

Only days before my state went into lockdown, “Bohemian Rhapsody” came on in the restaurant kitchen I’d just been hired at and, no shit, every single worker in that little diner started singing along. Me (the only queer afaik), the manager, all the other kitchen workers, the dishwasher up front, the two people on the counter, all but two of the men over 30. Just belting out Freddie Mercury at the top of their lungs. And you can bet when “sometimes I wish I’d never been born at all” came around, we every single one of us ramped up the intensity and basically made sure Freddie could hear us in the afterlife.

One of the things that struck me, listening to the video, is that you cannot distinguish the original vocals from the crowd, and sometimes you can barely hear the music. And the POV is on the stage the speakers are playing the song from!

There’s good reason why, nearly fifty years after the height of their career, Queen is still considered one of the best bands of all time ever.

(And how albums left lying about in cars will eventually metamorphose into Best of Queen albums.)

Something else that’s rather incredible about this is, Bohemian Rhapsody is a very difficult song from a technical standpoint. Like–humor me, okay, go flip it on and try to sing the whole thing at the top of your voice without falling off-key, out of breath, or cracking at least once. Then come back.

Okay. You’re back? Welcome back. Unless you’re a trained singer, you probably can’t do it. There are too many long notes, too many key changes, and too many places where–if you’re singing all the parts–you’re just up and down the scale too damned fast. I’m saying this as a trained singer and I can’t do it. I always crack on “magnifico” and “leave me to die,” and I have a pretty decent range, but I know I sound ugly as hell on that final coda.

Okay. Now that we’ve established that, I want to talk a little about singing as a chorus. One of the things a lot of people learned during the pandemic is how hard it is to take twenty people, all in different places, and stitch them together to make a single coherent song with perfect pitch and timing. You’re all practicing on slightly your own tempo, slightly your own key, even if you’re all working from the same base track. (You can see this in a lot of the Wellerman compilations from Tiktok, where someone always says “Soon” a moment before everyone else on “soon may the Wellerman come.”) When you have a chorus comprised of many smaller choruses that are all traveling to be together, this is what dress rehearsal is for–to get all of you onto the same tempo so you’re starting and finishing at exactly the same time. This is a thing that normally only happens after at least several days of practice, and it is an important skill that must be taught. You’re not just born knowing how to do this.

I do not know how many people at that Green Day concert were trained singers. But I do know there is no way in hell all few thousand of them were a single group–they showed up a few at a time, maybe even flying solo for the night. Now go and listen to the video again. Listen to the ends of verses and the pickups. They’re fucking crisp as hell. Everyone is starting and ending at the same place. Not even a single note off. (And yes, you can hear when it’s a single note off, even in a crowd that big. A handful of people would be enough to throw it off.) And while a few in the crowd may be off-key, so many more are on-key that the cumulative effect is of the song being on-key. This isn’t even the band they’re there to see.

They don’t just know this song, this technically-difficult song, this long and complex song by a completely different band. They know it perfectly. They know it down to the fucking note. They know it so well that they did it in perfect synchrony, without a single chance to practice.

Do you know how insane that is?

Hello everybody.

Please share resources and don’t keep silent about Palestine. Dedicate your day for them today. Do not ignore them, do not let their voices go unheard.

Here are some resources you can share around:

daily click

esims for Gaza

call for a ceasefire

donate feminine hygiene kits

learn about Palestine

Education, sources, donations

Shut it down for Palestine

Please do not ignore this post, share as much information and resources as you can for Palestine.

This porno didn’t fuck around

there’s… a lot to take in here…

I was so flummoxed by this I had to learn more, so I took to Google, where I found this blog post by Dan Cardone, who was a grip on this film. Some highlights:

All this talk and no one posts a link. God damn it, have to do everything myself around here! Here’s the promo page with previews and a purchase link from the actual Raging Stallions Studios website.