FEMA is doing an emergency alert test on all TVs, radios, and cell phones on October 4, 2023, at approximately 2:20pm ET.

If you live in the US and you have a phone you need to keep secret for any reason, make sure that it is turned off at this time.

Yes, I'm doing this months in advance, and yes, my blog has very little reach, but I figure better to post about it more than less.

Please reblog and add better tags than mine, I'm bad at tags.

OCTOBER 4, 2023

TURN OFF YOUR OTHER PHONE AND DO NOT TURN IT ON AGAIN UNTIL YOU ARE ALONE AND SAFE BECAUSE THE ALARM WILL COME THROUGH AS SOON AS THAT PHONE IS POWERED ON.

AGAIN I REPEAT:

OCTOBER 4, 2023

THE ALARM WILL COME THROUGH AS SOON AS THAT PHONE IS POWERED BACK ON.

SO ONLY POWER IT BACK ON WHEN IT IS SAFE TO DO SO.

OCTOBER 4, 2023

If this doesn't make sense, then good news it's not for or about you but still reblog it because you never know who may need to know this.

Reblog and add more tags.

There’s just a whole lot of reasons someone may need to be aware of/prepared for this, so boosting

It's actually kind of fascinating how exclusively english-as-a-second-language teachers only come in lawful alignments. I've had lawful evil english teachers, lawful neutral english teachers, and lawful good english teachers, but never one that wasn't one of the above.

Like how does a person whose entire moral code and sense of ethics is founded on a stalwart faith that There Are Rules That Must Be Followed dedicate their entire life's work to teaching the most chaotic goblin goddamn language currently spoken on Earth, that looted the word "loot", hunted their singular second person pronoun to extinction, and whose spelling and pronunciation are so detached from each other that native speakers have national competitions about getting it right?

Or is it like being a priest. Like you just have to have absolute faith in the ultimate sense and logic of it all, no matter how much evidence you see to the contrary, or you'll never make it in the field.

cruelty is so easy. youre not special for choosing it

"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."

-Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

"Evil is boring. Right? I kinda believe in the banality and mundaneness of evil. Evil is just selfish impulses, which at the end of the day are really easy to understand. It’s easy to understand why people do bad things. It’s like “yeah, ok, you’re selfish and scared and cruel, I get it”. Being good is complex and beautiful and hard." - Brennan Lee Mulligan

On a related note, the human brain is predisposed to give more attention to negative information, because it's more vital to survival to notice a potential danger (say, a dangerous animal, or a group member who is cheating or freeloading in some way) than a potential nice thing (like a beautiful view or a group member who is doing something unusual for fun).

Immediately coming up with an ulterior motive or other negative interpretation of novel information isn't especially clever. It doesn't automatically mean you're smarter than everyone who is seeing it as neutral or positive. It means you're leaning in to your brain's default settings.

The actual smart thing a range of explanations/interpretations, and apply some relevant criteria to determining which seem the most likely or important. In cases where an actual danger exists, it does make sense to give more weight to the negative possibilities, but automatically assuming an ulterior motive of every human being you see in an internet video a) does not improve your safety in any way, and b) isn't as impressive as you think it is.

If you want to look smart, try doing the hard work of believing that every other human being you see has an interiority as complex and many-layered as your own.

Handle with care

The reason I like history so much is the way you can see how unchanging human nature is. People have always been doing the same things, with different tools. Ancient Sumerians writing "I am not warning you now in hopes that you'll actually do anything, I am writing this to later prove that I warned you and you did nothing" messages in clay tablets like you'd write an office e-mail. Ancient philosophers talking about shepherds and archers, explaining the exact same problem you had this morning, like they're personally calling you out.

200 years ago, somebody was complaining about Kids These Days burying their faces in books in order to avoid socialising just the same as someone else is now ranting how their children would rather browse their phones than listen to them rant. People were arguing anonymously in the posting boards and newspaper sections just the same as they do on the internet. Someone in the bronze age woke up at 5 am to the sound of toddlers fighting over complete nonsense just the same as someone woke up to the same noises today.

For as long as there have been people, there have been people doing the same kind of things as you. From some dude in a cave with berries for paint, some Roman planning a mosaic on a wall, ancient Chinese noblewoman illustrating her calligraphed poem and some medieval monk decorating the borders of a manuscript and me on my laptop with my stylus pen, we're all just sitting here in our different times and places, wondering why the FUCK are horses so hard to draw.

Horses are just ovals

Well, you know, some bathroom graffiti offers insight.

Red marker handwriting on a bathroom wall. Text reads:

“Boss made a dollar Granddad made a dime But that was a poem From a simpler time.

Boss made a thousand Gave pa a cent But that penny paid the mortgage Or at least it paid the rent

Now Boss makes a million And gives us jack Smugly blames the workers For the labor that he lacks.”

And the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls.

[FIC] To Be Free Once More (That's Worth Fighting For) ~ Star Wars: Prequels ~ Fox/Obi-Wan ~ Mature ~ Ch 1/15

Title: To Be Free Once More (That’s Worth Fighting For) Fandom: Star Wars Prequel Era Author: Batsutousai Rating: Mature Warnings: Alternate Universe, Qui-Gon survives, Jedi Shadow!Obi-Wan, Jedi culture positive, Coruscant Guard deserve better, clone trooper dehumanisation, institutional abuse, discrimination, learning to trust, Jedi and clone trooper relationships, strangers to friends to lovers, idiots in love, trans/nonbinary/agender clone troopers, Summary: As a Jedi Shadow, Obi-Wan hadn’t expected to have much to do with the clone troopers. Until, suddenly, he does.

Notes: This fic will be 15 chapters long, with the final chapter going up at some point on the 17th of May, for those who prefer to binge.

CHAPTER ONE

Read the whole chapter at Archive of Our Own!

Please DO reblog this post; sharing is the best way to tell creators that you enjoyed their work.

This fic was a delight all the way through. The author requested a reblog and deserves it 😊

Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.

What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.

—James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket

SOME PEOPLE will tell you that February is a fine month, a good month to be born in even, but they are the exception that proves the rule: February is the worst month. 

SURVIVE IT. 

[ID: An image of a skeleton holding an hourglass, looking at it with what appears to be a rictus grin; over the top of the skeleton, in grey and black, are the words “Survive February.” Let us all survive.]

Netflix wants to chop down your family tree

Netflix has unveiled the details of its new anti-password-sharing policy, detailing a suite of complex gymnastics that customers will be expected to undergo if their living arrangements trigger Netflix’s automated enforcement mechanisms:

https://thestreamable.com/news/confirmed-netflix-unveils-first-details-of-new-anti-password-sharing-measures

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes

Keep reading

every time theres a new bad tv show or movie people act like its the end of the world you guys need to learn about the not watching shit method i’ve been successfully employing the not watching shit method for years

This tag deserves to be seen

PLEASE LISTEN TO THIS YOU DONT REALIZE WHAT YOURE MISSING

when a song ascends through its meme status

this is now officially my funeral song 

This… Is honestly amazing… Imagine putting this with a final boss where it feels like fighting is hopeless, but you continue to fight, not wanting to go down with out a fight. You’ve come too far to give up now… Perfect.

@pinkiefinger500 @saltyiwaizumi @ninetales-firecat

dont know what i was expecting just not that

Oh fuck off, this has no right to be this good.

internet friends are kinda like illegally downloaded friends. you don’t get the physical copy but you still get all the great content

#i’d illegally download you all

reblog if you’d illegally download your followers

Here’s a comic from I WILL JUDGE YOU BY YOUR BOOKSHELF, published by Abrams ComicArts. It’s available internationally wherever you get your books!

https://linktr.ee/grantdraws

You know, thinking about it, I don't think we had a target audience for the book. My target audience was Terry, and my goal in writing was making Terry laugh, Terry's target audience was me. It's the best bit about collaborations. We made a book we liked, and then hoped someone would buy it (and we were relieved when they did) and that people would find it and like it (and we were relieved when they did).

I remember vividly seeing Sir Terry Pratchett at Worldcon in 2004 (it was in my home town) and him discussing Good Omens and saying "I knew we had something special when I told Neil, 'I really like this bit you wrote', and Neil said, 'I didn't write that, I thought you wrote that', and I said, 'I certainly didn't write that', and then we never talked about it again."