something nobody ever warns you about being in your 20s is back pain. hey what the fuck is up with that. i should be at the club but instead i suddenly understand my grandma

When I was in college, round about 2002 or so, I did a paper on hate groups that necessitated a couple of visits to Stormfront, a white supremacist website and message board. One of the pages on the site was a "children's page" operated by the child of Storrmfront's founder, which was a unique form of horrifying. But I also remember looking at a photo of the kid on the site and thinking, that poor fuckin' kid, what kind of chance did he ever have?

But it was just a paper and that was just a photo of a child I didn't know, so I turned in the paper and graduated and got on with life.

In 2016, @archwrites posted a link to an article by the Washington Post titled "The White Flight of Derek Black" (sorry about the paywall, Arch's post quotes some relevant parts here). I thought it looked like an interesting read: it was about a white supremacist named Derek Black and a group of campus activists at the school Black eventually attended, who set out to see if they could change his mind about race with radical kindness. In large part because of their work, Black eventually renounced white supremacy and became an antiracist.

And then I hit a photo in the article and gasped, because I recognized it. I'd seen the same photo on the Stormfront children's website. The kid I'd seen and pitied was grown up and had gotten out. Immensely satisfying to see.

But it was just a news story about someone I didn't even know, so I posted about how pleased I was to see it, and I got on with life again.

This morning, I woke to the news (sorry, it's the Daily Fail) that R. Derek Black, now 35, has just published a memoir, The Klansman's Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism. And in the epilogue, they come out as trans.

I can't imagine better news I could have heard about them -- that they're out, they're thriving, and they're embracing themself.

Congratulations, kid. It's a great new photo.

[ID: A recent photograph of R. Derek Black, with long curly red hair, wearing a floral collared shirt and a red cardigan, smiling for the camera.]

hope you don't mind but I found the Post article extremely good, so here's a gift link for anyone who wishes to read it in full.

Oh I don't mind at all -- that's actually great, thank you! Reblogging so people can access the article through the link.

(Made by @dethharmonic )

i recommend every history student to play the appropriate assassin’s creed game before starting to learn about a subject bc it makes everything 10000% funnier like. hey. i know this guy. he had an unresolved yet undeniable homoerotic sexual tension with my favorite video game man. what’s he doing here.

ok steven universe pfp

this was honestly so iconic. she then proceeded to decide that every anon she got was sent by me (i sent none), and said i sent her death threats (????), while only referring to me as a ‘theyfab fujoshi’ which is. you know. a normal thing to call gay men. anyways all this over me calling a man that died over two thousand yesrs ago babygirl

listen those are just the kind of things that happen to me on this site

listen those are just

the kind of things that happen

to me on this site

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

i genuinely see the worst of humanity in insta reels comments

every day should be like i wake up & my first thought is a beautiful idea of a fun & new activity & i spend my day accomplishing it

i do want to live like them like so bad

When ur like: “this show is very good.  In fact, it is too good.  I want something I can watch with 30% brain and this is a minimum 60% brain show.”

@markscherz

Harold is a Ceratophrys cranwelli.

#i appreciate that you have a picture of a chonk frog#you learn the chonk frog is named harold#and then the curator of reptiles at the national history museum of denmark (seriously) weighs in at the bottom#to identify harold's species#you can't get this kind of content anywhere else

did anyone ever tell the Backstreet Boys why

My FAVORITE quote, of all time, is from the like, 2008 VH1 Top 50 Best Boy Band Songs special when AJ was commentating this song’s #1 win and he said, “I’ve never understood this song. WHAT WAY do I want it? And why DON’T I want it that way if SHE wants it that way? What’s the way? This song makes no sense. But man, they paid me to sing it.”

He was so distressed about his confusion, and I loved it. I love this song. It is truly the song of all time.

The songwriter, Max Martin, has written or contributed to the lyrics for a huge number of pop hits since the 90s. Max Martin is Swedish, and English is not his first language, a fact which feels incredibly obvious once you know it.

It’s not my intention to mock him for this–his English is miles ahead of my Swedish!–but this sincere vagueness and novel interpretations of English grammar are a noticeable quirks of his songs, especially his earlier work, so much so that trying to tease apart the individual words and phrases of the songs is a task designed for a Greek tragedy. His songs are the aursl embodiment of “no thoughts just vibes.”

Citation: Slate’s 2014 article/highlight reel of some of Martin’s most baffling lyrical Decisions:

They don’t bring it up in that article, but Martin is also responsible for Britney Spears’s “…One More Time,” and I’m sorry to anyone in whom something was awakened with those lyrics, but our good friend Max thought “hit me” was contemporary American slang for “call me.”

I feel like this adds a thin, waxy coating of surrealism in a genre whose worst examples can lean hard toward bland vapidity, and I love that Backstreet Boys lyrics are still making people question their sanity 25 years on. But mostly I can’t get over the thought of all of these singers–many of them already really big before they worked with Martin–puzzling their way through these lyrics enough to figure out how to sell the shit out of them.

“hit me up” the phrase he was probably thinking of was “hit me up”.

This does not even begin to cover the weirdness of cathode ray televisions.

They are literally particle accelerators that you point at your face.

And for eighty years, Americans' favorite thing to do was turn them on and stare at them for hours.

If you overcharge them, they emit gamma radiation.

Servicing them is like disarming a bomb -- their capacitors are enormous and are usually charged to hundreds or thousands of volts, and most of them have no bleed system that drains that charge, meaning that they can still be dangerous months or years after the last time they were powered up. A discharge can not only electrocute you, it can cause tools to melt or explode.

A black-and-white cathode ray TV driven by an unmodulated analog signal is theoretically capable of resolution that would require a microscope to perceive.

Old school CRT monitors had the same issues.

Back when, I worked at a small whitebox pc manufacturer. One day, a service tech brought back an older, gigantic (30 inch or so) AutoCAD monitor from a service call. The customer said "Made me feel nauseous"

So, we put it on the bench and fired it up. You immediately felt the hair on your body stand up, and my co worker put his hand up close to turn the power off, and his hand and forearm started spasming - I yanked the power cord from the wall as the tingle I was feeling began to feel hot.

No idea what was wrong with the thing, but it was kicking out some serious electro magnetic radiation.

Remembering the almost imperceptible high pitched buzzing that let you know the tv was still on even when nothing was on the screen. Also putting your forearm near the screen and watching the hairs stand up

The little crackle if you touched the screen to wipe it...

Omg no one's even talking about the smell of the screen

This is both horrifying to read and nostalgic

I still have one for my SNES.

Y’all have not yet mentioned the fact that the screen could take much harder knocks than you’d expect for a glass monitor, but G-d help you if it did break, because if it did it’d explode.

1% of CRT static is from the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation from the beginning of the universe.

I miss staring into it.

turned this in for my biology assignment today online school is going well

Grandmas were so right about puzzles and knitting and crocheting and solitaire and reading slow and slippers and baking and watching deer in the backyard send post

depiction is not the same as glorification and I need people to get that 

depiction from the POV of a character who thinks it’s okay is still not glorification

But…. But the Hayes Code clearly states…

“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot

“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.

"you are functionally a conservative" is such a good and clarifying insult

Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women's bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as "objectively terrible" and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn't like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn't like a light "unpopular opinion!" conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.

There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone's mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.

I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.

Now I can't find any adults who don't hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, "well except for book X..."

Functionally conservative. It's so important to have the language to express that.

Thank you for this addition!

And, following up on the previous post …

“This makes me uncomfortable” is NOT a valid reason for censorship

These fucking book editors should remove themselves from the profession ASAP 😡

The only reason a book should be removed, the ONLY reason, is “we are keeping it in the restricted section for research because its only intended function is to cause harm.”

And to be clear, when I say this, I’m talking about shit like To Train Up A Child and The Protocols of Zion. One is a text responsible for the deaths of multiple children because it’s an abuse how-to, and the other is entirely fabricated “protocols” from a group that never actually existed but is claimed to represent all Jews, and it’s basically one long antisemitic screed.

And even these should be available. Just. Not where they’re gonna be used to start a white supremacist cult.

We had a copy of Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf on the shelves in my primary school's library. It was in a restricted section, i.e. books you could only borrow with adult supervision, if you had to write an essay on Nazism or Hitler for example, but it was there. In perfectly plain view, sitting on a shelf, while first graders checked out Asterix comics and odd nerds read The Silmarillion over on the couches (it's me, I am odd nerds).

That book is Nazi propaganda, an utterly incoherent anti-semitic screed full of fascist talking points, and its contents are, objectively speaking, dangerous. It is a book that calls for society-scale genocidal bigotry, and all of its pages are bent towards making that argument as persuasively as it can.

And yet, there it was, in plain view of children in a primary school, because what the teachers at my school understood is that, first of all, kids don't really give that much of a shit about a fascist's masturbatory autobiography, not when there's Asterix available.

And second, that what children need is not to be hermetically sealed away from all forms of harmful media for fear that they be corrupted, what they need is to learn to navigate harmful media, to read it critically, to process the awful things inside of it and come out the other side without being persuaded to do or think something horrible.

Children need - and I mean need - to learn the skills to do this, because otherwise they grow up into adults with no defenses against propaganda and misinformation, i.e. the exact kind of angry, terrified, flailing mob that gets persuaded to assault a nation's capitol when an election doesn't go their way.

Nobody is immune to propaganda and anyone can fall deep into a conspiracy hole, but there are levels of resistance to those things a person can develop.

And the only way to develop resistance is to be exposed to it!

It's a necessary part of the process, it is mandatory, you have to be exposed to it so you can learn what it is and how to deal with it. And either that exposure happens in a controlled learning environment, with trained teachers helping someone through it, or it happens in an uncontrolled environment to a person who has never learned how to understand what they're looking at.

None of this means that everyone should be reading Mein Kampf to their kids or w/e, but it means that the attitude of "ban this filth!" only plays into the hands of people who actually are trying to corrupt people morally.

The reason to teach something in school is not necessarily to teach that it is good or bad. Teaching should, ideally, be about THE STUDENT LEARNING HOW TO THINK CRITICALLY ABOUT IT. And we CAN learn to think critically about anything. Absolutely anything! You don’t go “here’s creationism, it’s wrong,” you go “here’s creationism—how could it be wrong? What would have to be true in order for it to be right?” All those discussion questions I spent middle and high school hating and annoyed and bored by. Those are the meat of learning. Why is it like this? Who made it like this? Why did they do what they did? Who benefited from that? Who suffered because of it? How has it changed over time? Is it literal or figurative? If you wanted to use this for evil, how would you? How would you recognize it if someone else wanted to use it for evil?

Any work, no matter what, has the potential to teach us something if we ask the right questions about it. This is why TEACHERS SHOULD MAKE MORE THAN ENOUGH MONEY FOR A COMFORTABLE AND FULFILLING LIFE INSTEAD OF GETTING SHOVED INTO THE PRODUCTIVITY MEAT GRINDER!

my family is fucking addicted to macgyvering and it's becoming a problem. every time something in this house breaks, instead of doing the sensible thing of replacing it or calling someone qualified to fix it, we all group around the offending object with a manic look in our eyes and everyone gets a try at fixing it while being cheered on or ridiculed by the rest.

it's a beautiful bonding activity, but the "creative" fixes have turned our house into a quasihaunted escape room like contraption where everything works, but only in the wonkiest of ways. you need a huge block of iron to turn on the stove. the oven only works if a specific clock is plugged in. the bread machine has a huge wood block just stapled to it that has become foundational to its function. sometimes when you use the toaster the doorbell rings. and that's just the kitchen.

it's all fun and games until you have guests over and you have to lay out the rules of the house like it's a fucking board game. welcome to the beautiful guest room. don't pull out the couch yourself you need a screwdriver for that, and that metal rod makes the lamp work so don't move it. it also made me a terrifying roommate in college, because it makes me think i can fix anything with enough hubris and a drill. you want to call the landlord about a leaky faucet? as if. one time my dad made me install a new power socket because we ran our of extension cords

to the people saying this isn't safe in the tags: my dad has a engineering degree and my brother is a mechanic this is like. state sanctioned macgyvering. safe sane and consensual macgyvering. our house will not burn down. in fact, i think it has made us all better in approaching problems from all angles when they arise, which has served me well in life, especially in high stress situations.

does our hot water switch off every thirty seconds making showers an exiting exercise in counting and resilience? yes. but one time the door of the train toilet broke, trapping me inside, and i went "well i can either succumb to the panic of claustrophobia or do this family-style" and then spent twenty minutes breaking down the lock with my shoelace and the belt i was wearing. so i'll take the cold water any day

Never have I wanted to see inside a stranger's home more

OP lives in a point-and-click adventure game

Or possibly in the dictionary definition of "engineer's syndrome"