Throwing a toddler tantrum and handing the country back to a senile, deranged, fascist, revenge-riddled, theocratic Trump HELPS. NOBODY.

louder for the morons in the back who are still whining about both parties being the same

Not voting for the left because they're not Left Enough also does not make the party go more left. It makes them go more right. Because that's where the votes are.

Reblogging because for the love of Christ, I wish the “I’m not going to vote for Biden because he’s not pure/ far left/ whatever enough for me” crowd would remember what, EXACTLY, it would mean for there to be a second Trump presidency.

Assuming that any checks currently in place would stop someone who’s mindset is “I’m perfect and DESERVE to be president” from turning our country into the closest approximation of Russia he can get, is not only naive, it’s dangerously, determinedly ignorant.

I said this in 2016 and I said it in 2020 and I'll say it again:

If you don't like the fact that the leftmost candidate of the two major parties isn't left enough, the solution is neither to refuse to vote, nor to "send a message" by voting third party. Both result in an advantage to the rightmost candidate.

The solution is, vote for the guy that's not quite good enough, and then lean on him hard.

Biden has moved farther to the left than any president since Roosevelt. Yes. He's gotten more of our agenda done than Clinton or Obama. And there's many things he's tried to do that the right wingers in Congress or in the Supreme Court have stopped him from doing. He's also moved farther to the left than any president I know of when you look at his whole career; at one point he was Liberal Lite, "moderate", pro-corporation, etc... and it seems he learned from it. He changed. So we're dealing with a guy who is capable of moving left, has done so, and could be asked to go farther.

The other candidate literally wants to become a dictator, eliminate freedom of the press, and spend our tax dollars persecuting his "enemies."

Do I like the fact that Biden is supporting Israel militarily when they have caused such an enormous and horrible death toll in Gaza? No. But we have treaties with Israel and we can't easily break them. Meanwhile we have actually seen him call Netanyahu out. Including saying basically "You keep this up and no one will be your friend", implying that he is threatening to withdraw support. Trump, meanwhile, is cheerfully Islamophobic and would happily murder every single Palestinian. You care about Palestine, there is only one legitimate choice. I'm sorry, I know you want to believe there are multiple moral options you can take, but there is really only one. In the US's winner-take-all first-past-the-post no ranked choice system, the guy who gets 51% of the vote and the guy who gets 90% of the vote are exactly the same.

Look, we can win this. The right's abortion bans are wildly unpopular; many people will be voting to try to restore the right to control our own bodies. Republican support skews older, but in four years millennials didn't magically reach a point of comfortable status quo where they're likely to start voting Republican; instead Republicans have doubled down on the crazy. Anti-maskers and ant-vaxxers, who are likely Republicans, are much more likely to have died of COVID than the reality-based community on the left, since Biden won by 7 million votes 4 years ago.

But Trump will do everything in his power to cheat. We can't just win by 51%. We have to trounce him and as many Republicans at the ballot box as we can, because they have lost the plot. Even the best ones refuse to do anything to stop the spread of this evil-for-its-own-sake movement that wants queers, Jews, and Muslims dead, POC subservient, and women of all races securely under the thumb of men. We have to stop this movement by sending a message to politicians, "these are not winning ideologies. Embrace these ideologies because of the fanatic fringe, and you will lose." Most of them aren't true believers; they're pandering. The only way to stop the Republicans being pointlessly destructive is to make so many of them lose, the rest realize, shit, the grownups are back, we better start acting like politicians and not demagogues again.

And one of the best ways to do that is to make sure Biden wins by such a large margin even Trump can't cheat his way to victory. Because he's ready. He's promised, there will be violence if he loses. (There will also be violence if he wins, but it will be state violence against us. If he loses, there will be rioting white thugs in red states, but the federal government will still have both the power and the will to try to stop that.) He's going to pull every dirty trick in the book to win. The only way to stop him is to win overwhelmingly. Then we get four more years of relative safety, where if Clarence Thomas dies or gets arrested we get a young liberal judge in his place, and in that time, we can push the Democratic party farther to the left, because they'll know why they won. They'll know who voted for them, and why, and they'll move in that direction because they want to keep winning.

You cannot save Gaza by making sure Biden loses. That is actually the worst possible thing that could happen, in terms of anything any American could do. Netanyahu wants Trump to win because Trump will back him up no matter what he does to the Palestinians.

Voting is not about proving how moral you are and selecting the perfect candidate. Voting is about getting the best possible candidate out of what is usually a lackluster selection. But this time, the choice is, an old guy who's not as charismatic and shiny as we'd like and hasn't done as much as we want, vs, literally, a wanna be dictator with an agenda that's pure evil.

please please please please reblog if you’re a writer and have at some point felt like your writing is getting worse. I need to know if I’m the only one who’s struggling with these thoughts

custody battle (shadowbringers in a nutshell)

this is by far my favorite safety/warning sign btw. they really went off with this one

No cuz I fucking love this sign. It’s not an actual barrier so it’s not like some sort of challenge it simply says “fuck around and you will find out”

Ohohoho I LOVE “fuck around and find out” signs, especially the really dramatic and ominous (but true) ones

(Context for the last one: it’s a WWII era sign posted around the soldiers’ washroom mirror, warning them to never discuss military plans in places where civilians could hear them and report back to the enemy, e.g. in restaurants and pubs in the country. “Loose lips sink ships”.)

I also love these two, which I would place in the category of “You already fucked around, now you’re about to find out.”

Aerated water is fucking scary. It's water that has a fuckton of gas in it, which reduces the buoyancy to the point where you will immediately start to sink if you fall in.

ive been collecting these recently and wanted to add some of my favorites

Official ominous signs

I love these but I have to point out that the bushfire one is not as simple as "you fucked around, now find out" - there are valid reasons why you might choose to stay in the path of a bushfire, especially in a rural area (if your property is hard to access, you have the infrastructure to fight a fire, and you know what you're doing, you are arguably better off staying, especially if you have stock). There are also valid reasons to leave while the roads are still safe. This is why you need a bushfire safety plan, even if that plan is "get the fuck out ASAP". Very valid plan.

It turns into fucking around when you don't have a plan (or you abandon your plan), especially if you get on the road when it's not safe. You will very quickly find out a lot of valuable information about bushfires. Whether you get much use out of that information is another question.

1000% ominous though. It's been four and a half years since the big fire came through here (we should have left, we stayed, we were very lucky) and seeing "It is too late to leave" still gives me chills.

Anyway to make myself feel better I went and found my favourite danger sign, plus a few bonus "if you fuck around in the middle of Australia nobody will find you"

Straya! *jazz hands*

Honourary mentions to some of my favourite navigation ones

wol: it's not my fault that I don't remember! I didn't choose to get sundered! Emet, with no clue how he escaped the sundering: skill issue

i literally cannot stop. will reblog with the link once i’m done.

LET’S GET META, Y’ALL

the unreliable narrator

whether you’re intentionally lying, or you genuinely have no idea that what you see isn’t the truth, your readers cannot trust you at all - not when it comes to getting the facts, at least. as a narrator and character, you’re thoroughly entertaining and complex, and will probably become the source of a few dozen thesis statements in any given semester. trying to pin down what your true motivations are, and sort out what’s real and what’s not are fool’s errands, but that won’t stop anyone.

the peripheral narrator

the stream of consciousness

the epistolary narrator

the story is told through your diaries and letters, meaning everything has a deeply emotional and personal bent to it. you’re not always the most objective narrator - and why should you be, it’s your diary! - but you’re usually truthful and always endearing. much of what the reader knows about the others comes from how you write to and about them, lending you a surprising amount of control over the narrative. whether or not you’re entirely fair in your depictions depends on your genre… and what mood you’re in that day.

the biased narrator

close cousin of the unreliable narrator, but less obvious - even to yourself. you're not intentionally lying to your reader, and nothing you say is an outright lie, but it's colored by your own perceptions, and this ain't an omniscient narrator situation. you're emotionally invested in everything that happens, and you have Opinions on everyone you meet, and that bleeds through in how you describe things. you're mostly a good source of information, but your audience may have to read things once or twice more to get the full, unbiased story.

it's true and you should say so louder

I don't know any of you, hitting the reblog button.

Same. 🤣

Give soup!!

what if i told you that a lot of “Americanized” versions of foods were actually the product of immigrant experiences and are not “bastardized versions”

That’s actually fascinating, does anyone have any examples?

Chinese-American food is a really good example of this and this article provides a good intro to the history http://firstwefeast.com/eat/2015/03/illustrated-history-of-americanized-chinese-food

I took an entire class about Italian American immigrant cuisine and how it’s a product of their unique immigrant experience. The TL;DR is that many Italian immigrants came from the south (the poor) part of Italy, and were used to a mostly vegetable-based diet. However, when they came to the US they found foods that rich northern Italians were depicted as eating, such as sugar, coffee, wine, and meat, available for prices they could afford for the very first time. This is why Italian Americans were the first to combine meatballs with pasta, and why a lot of Italian American food is sugary and/or fattening. Italian American cuisine is a celebration of Italian immigrants’ newfound access to foods they hadn’t been able to access back home.

(Source: Cinotto, Simone. The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City. Chicago: U of Illinois, 2013. Print.)

Stuff you Missed in History Class has a really good podcast overview of “Foreign Food” in the US.

I LOVE learning about stuff like this :D

that corned beef and cabbage thing you hear abou irish americans is actually from a similar situation but because they weren’t allowed to eat that stuff due to that artificial famine

<3 FOOD HISTORY <3

Everyone knows Korean barbecue, right? It looks like this, right?

Well, this is called a “flanken cut” and was actually unheard of in traditional Korean cooking. In traditional galbi, the bone is cut about two inches long, separated into individual bones, and the meat is butterflied into a long, thin ribbon, like this:

In fact, the style of galbi with the bones cut short across the length is called “LA Galbi,” as in “Los Angeles-style.” So the “traditional Korean barbecue” is actually a Korean-American dish.

Now, here’s where things get interesting. You see, flanken-cut ribs aren’t actually all that popular in American cooking either. Where they are often used however, is in Mexican cooking, for tablitas.

So you have to imagine these Korean-American immigrants in 1970s Los Angeles getting a hankering for their traditional barbecue. Perhaps they end up going to a corner butcher shop to buy short ribs. Perhaps that butcher shop is owned by a Mexican family. Perhaps they end up buying flanken-cut short ribs for tablitas because that’s what’s available. Perhaps they get slightly weirded out by the way the bones are cut so short, but give it a chance anyway. “Holy crap this is delicious, and you can use the bones as a little handle too, so now galbi is finger food!” Soon, they actually come to prefer the flanken cut over the traditional cut: it’s easier to cook, easier to serve, and delicious, to boot! 

Time goes on, Asian fusion becomes popular, and suddenly the flanken cut short rib becomes better known as “Korean BBQ,” when it actually originated as a Korean-Mexican fusion dish!

I don’t know that it actually happened this way, but I like to think it did.

Corned beef and cabbage as we know it today? That came to the Irish immigrants via their Jewish neighbors at kosher delis.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/is-corned-beef-really-irish-2839144/

The Irish immigrants almost solely bought their meat from kosher butchers. And what we think of today as Irish corned beef is actually Jewish corned beef thrown into a pot with cabbage and potatoes. The Jewish population in New York City at the time were relatively new immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe. The corned beef they made was from brisket, a kosher cut of meat from the front of the cow. Since brisket is a tougher cut, the salting and cooking processes transformed the meat into the extremely tender, flavorful corned beef we know of today.

The Irish may have been drawn to settling near Jewish neighborhoods and shopping at Jewish butchers because their cultures had many parallels. Both groups were scattered across the globe to escape oppression, had a sacred lost homeland, discriminated against in the US, and had a love for the arts. There was an understanding between the two groups, which was a comfort to the newly arriving immigrants. This relationship can be seen in Irish, Irish-American and Jewish-American folklore. It is not a coincidence that James Joyce made the main character of his masterpiece Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, a man born to Jewish and Irish parents. 

Ahh, similar origin to fish and chips in the UK then.

That meal came about either in London or the North of England where Jewish immigrant fried fish venders decided to team up with the Irish cooked potato sellers to produce the meal everyone associates with the UK.

Because while a bunch of stuff from the UK was lifted and adapted from folks we colonised (Mulligatawny soup for example, was an adaptation of a soup recipe found in India and which British chefs tried to approximate back home), some of it was made by folks who actively moved here (like tikka masala, that originated in a restaurant up in Scotland).

Super interesting.

And that’s BEFORE we get into replacing a staple crop! So in the Southern US, you have two groups of people, one who used oats and one who used plantains, and they BOTH replace their staples with corn. And then you get Southern food.

For those interested in a really deep dive on Chinese food in the United States, I cannot over-recommend Jennifer 8 Lee’s Fortune Cookie Chronicles.

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

an article on the subject for the curious:

This machine kills AI

This is the most satisfying story I've read in a long time

In The Beginning (Good Omens x FFXIV AU) [5-6/8] [first] [prev]

Page count went up from 6 to 8 because I changed my mind about the last couple pages. It's probably the final page count, though I already have some ideas for additional parts.

the fact that any video game ever gets made is a fucking miracle, let alone good ones.

whenever someone explains to me how video games work, i feel like ive been exposed to some horrifying cthulu ass shit that i can never unsee.

In The Beginning (Good Omens x FFXIV AU) [3-4/6] [prev]

This was the moment that Crawley came to realize three things about this unassuming Lalafell: that he can use a sword, that he was kind, and that he was maybe - just maybe - willing to risk skirting the rules if it meant doing the right thing.

New Looney Tunes Crew done did it again

It took me a few seconds to realize this is new! The art style and the animation style are so similar to the originals that the only tells I could find are the higher quality from the ones I grew up with and they were never in a sushi restaurant in any of the old shorts I remember.

Revolving sushi bars came to the US in the early 2000s, so yes, this is delightfully sizing up a brand-new modern, interesting space with contraptions and objects we're all familiar with and transforming into a fantastic battleground and obstacle course.

So much translation discourse just boils down to monolinguals not understanding that "coolness" doesn't translate across languages, and you need to re-add it manually on the other end.

Spanish and French understand the anglicism so just say "eso es muy cool" or "c'est très cool" if the context is not particularly formal

No no, not literally the word "cool" I mean the [concept of coolness]. Things that sound cool, poetic, funny, dramatic, etc in one language will completely fail to land if you simply go 1-to-1 word equivalents.

In the Japanese version of Fullmetal Alchemist, the antagonists are named after the seven deadly sins, in English. As in, rather than the Japanese word, "Greed" is still Greed in the original.

Because loan words from English are often pretty "cool", as with your Spanish and French example.

But this presents a problem, because, to give them a bit of flair, the antagonists are sometimes given a proper Japanese adjective along with their name, to make a sort of title of sorts.

"Greedy Greed"

The italicized part would be a Japanese adjective, and the bolded part is an English loanword. This is fine in Japanese, but would be totally nonsense in an English translation.

After all, it's common sense to keep the names the same, duh, and obviously the whole point of what you're doing is to translate the Japanese.

Greedy Greed. You cannot call him that.

You can't go 1-to-1. To keep the [concept of coolness], you have to identify what made the original cool, and then recreate it in the new language.

And here, we have a foreign word, and a native word, both meaning the same thing, paired together to give an antagonist a cool sounding title. So how do we do that in English.

Well, the seven deadly sins, being Christian and Catholic and all, have fancy names in Latin. Or well, they just sound fancy in English, because Latin was the language of intellectuals for a long long time.

And in fact, while we also have the word "greed", English has a fancier sounding word that means the same thing, but whose etymology comes from the fancy Latin. That might give a similar cool-loanword feeling, right?

Let's try it.

"Greed the Avaricious"

Oh yeah. That's definitely, undeniably, "cool".

the next time you hesitate to leave a comment on a fic remember that I go back and read all the comments I get on my fic whenever I'm feeling down and it makes me feel so much better

if you leave nice comments on ao3 i love you