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Mermaids Dream of Other Things

@mermaidsdream / mermaidsdream.tumblr.com

Sometimes photographer, occasional wordsmith, longtime dreamer. Oh, and I bake awesome cookies
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The state of play today:

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mudwerks
It was the result of having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — "turn the other cheek" — [and] to have someone come up after to say, "Where did you get those liberal talking points?" And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, "I'm literally quoting Jesus Christ," the response would not be, "I apologize." The response would be, "Yes, but that doesn't work anymore. That's weak." And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we're in a crisis.

re-emphasizing this important point

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cleolinda

I'm gonna admit that I got on Twitter like a big ol' dramatic dork last night and said, knowing full well that Elon Musk was doing exactly this, "If he changes the name to X, I'm out, I can't do this anymore."

Not because "X" is doofy and a terrible branding move, although it is, but because he wants to do THIS shit. Yeah, no, I am not hanging around for your global interactivity "everything app" bullshit. You want me to fucking BANK with you? YOU? You just lost about $30B running a platform into the GROUND by FIRING EVERYONE and doing whatever damn thing popped into your head between shitposts? Are you HIGH? I cannot hang around for this "tech king of the world, 420 blaze it lmao" bullshit. I could not stay at my beloved Livejournal after SUP said all the users would be subject to Russian law in 2017. I know The Moment when I see it. I can't do this.

I admit, I might go back every few months and say "Hey, I posted XYZ on any platform but this, please leave this godforsaken place," and I don't want to delete my accounts. I've been on Twitter since 2008, and I have a ton of livetweet threads (on my main and also on an alt for that purpose. Remember that time I livetweeted the Twilight gender-change book? That glorious trainwreck?). I've saved some of them via Thread Reader PDF downloads, but there are still more to get. I don't want to utterly destroy book and TV discussion we did over there.

I haven't used Twitter regularly since maybe 2016 (about the time the post-Gamergate alt-right really moved in), but the conversation and community, decentralized though it was, before that--we're going to lose the last vestiges of that, the way everyone on Reddit was upset about losing the collective knowledge over there. And I'm so fucking angry about it. I'm so angry. I immediately came back here the week he took over last year because I knew, I KNEW, somehow that Twitter would be destroyed. I just thought it would burn down in a smoking heap of rubble, not turned into a shambling tech zombie under a different name. I just. I can't do this anymore.

Also, shut the fuck up, Linda Yaccarino. Just because you can put Elon Musk's nonsense into coherent verbiage doesn't mean "a global social media/marketplace/banking system/walled garden that's basically X-Treme AOL" isn't a fucking nightmare. I hope the EU bans the fuck out of you both. See you in bankruptcy court.

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curseworm

i think that every child should have unrestricted access to thick blackberry brambles or some other delicious fruit that grows encased in a painful fortress. i think wading through thorns to reach the cluster of shining ripe berries you spied through a gap between the tangled vines teaches you something important. not sure what though

i just know no fruit has ever tasted as sweet as the ones i ate while bleeding under the blistering summer sun

My grandparents let blackberry vines grow wild on their property. Oh, they’d managed to keep them in neat rows for a spell, but the blackberries did what blackberries are wont to do: grow faster & wilder than anyone can manage.

Some of my favourite childhood memories involve wandering down those rows, plucking thick, fat berries directly off their vines, putting the smaller ones in the green, plastic pint containers to take back to grandma “for canning,” while walking that razor-fine edge of “eating just enough” and “I made myself sick.”

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This was the first I've heard of this but apparently SAG-AFTRA would like cosplayers not to dress up as characters from Live Action media

Sources:

  1. Klaudia Amenábar on twitter
  2. Estar Guars Tia on twitter
  3. SAG-AFTRA's guidelines for influencers

Important info from the comments:

ID in Alt-text

If you are not an influencer and maybe want to reshuffle your cosplay schedule in solidarity that's great, but you're not under any requirements to refrain.

And it's always valid to cosplay <X Character> with a picket sign, studios will hate it.

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oh hozier the man you are

"before you see the next one just know I've never been well" I am obsessed with this man

*double checks her order*

Looks like I DID order the signed one.

Looks like I’ll be stalking my mailbox when this gets released.

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reblogged

you can read the newest installment of my webcomic "what happens next" now at https://whathappensnext.webcomic.ws/comics/781#content-start. this marks the end of chapter 5.

tumblr needs to get on top of WHN, it's one of the most brutal and well-observed things i've ever read about internet freaks and the artstyle fucks

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bigbigtruck

I'm so glad to see this on my dash; I read the newest chapter a few days ago and then went back and reread the first and MAN it is written MASTERFULLY. So many hints early on that seem innocuous but come to fruition later.

WHN might be the best piece of serial fiction going right now, and it's desperately needed online in an age where Online is full of YA audience-author posturing and "good guys must be good, bad guys get no redemption" - just about EVERYONE in WHN sucks, they suck in an extremely human way, and they suck for understandable, relatable reasons.

It kinda reminds me of a way more grounded and real Paranoia Agent - tragedies big and small that unfold as everyone dodges responsibility for their actions-- for reasons the reader can totally understand. It's fucking brilliant and messy and gray and needed right now.

and yeah, heed the content warnings: it's a rough as hell read, and necessarily so.

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foxxology

I am so excited to leave twitter permanently as soon as possible

and i made a powerpoint for twitter migrants so they can use this hellsite correctly lmao

im very proud of it :)

okay i finished dinner heres the whole thing!

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wilwheaton

We've been telling you for literal YEARS that Guy Fieri is garbage. People who have worked with him have been telling you for years that he's a shitty person.

WELP.

I’m going to just reblog this because this seems like another “Tumblr has decided you should hate this person” bullshit moments. Especially since Fieri is notoriously apolitical publicly so no one knows where he stands. But that’s also just the smart celebrity move these days. 

Now if he comes out publicly as a staunch republican and Trump supporter, that will be an entirely different thing, and he will be dead to me at that time.

BUT for now it’s NOT a thing.  And for clarification about what’s going on in the picture I’ll share this bit someone else posted.

Also, Linsey Ellis did a video on Fieri here (sadly it’s on nebula so you have to subscribe) https://nebula.tv/videos/lindsayellis-everyone-loves-guy-fieri-now

If you want a more scathing take on it. Here.

Basically, Fieri is nice to everyone because he doesn't want to drive off any of his fan base. It's a planned thing and yeah the whole "apolitical" thing is bullshit these days. But it's also a business move.

Meanwhile he's officiated over 100 gay weddings and is helping raise his sister's kid, with his sister's partner, after his sister died in 2011.

The lengths people will go to, in order to normalize and justify Guy Fieri’s just casually shaking hands and laughing with Donald Trump, as if Donald Trump weren’t the modern day incarnation of Hitler, as if Donald Trump hadn’t done any of the unforgivable things he’s done, as if uncountable numbers of people are not dead directly because of Donald Trump’s actions, and making it all just not a big deal because “Guy Fieri is just nice to everyone” is pathetic. It’s pathetic.

“Hey, I’m Guy Fieri, and I’m nice to EVERYONE, from the gays all the way to the Fascists who want to murder them for existing! See? ALL LIVES MATTER! I’M A GOOD GUY”

Get the fuck out of here. If you pose for a photo with a the most infamous white supremacist alive in America today, and smile while you’re shaking his hand, you are not apolitical. You are PROFOUNDLY political, and you’ve told EVERYONE what your values are, who you are, and what you’re willing to stand for.

At best, Guy Fieri is a coward. At worst, he’s on team trump.

And all these people who can’t trip over themselves fast enough to defend him are telling on themselves, as well.

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12u3ie

I just went on a rant about plungers, how’s your day going?

Image

“go off bestie”? Okay, I will.

This is a plunger.

Classic red cup with a wooden stick. We all know it, love it, and have seen a cartoon character using it to unclog a toilet. Right?

WRONG.

The image above is actually a drain plunger, used on sinks, showers, and baths. Not on toilets.

These are a toilet plungers.

Take note of the variations. Each of them have a flange of sorts at the bottom, either connected via a cup or more accordion-like tube. These are designed to actually get down into the toilet bowl where it flushes down, giving it more space and leverage to unclog blockages. See the example below:

Notice how the flange allows it to go deeper into the toilet to provide more power to the plunge. Sink/drain plungers are far less efficient and effective at the task.

Sink plungers can also have an accordion shape to help with power in plunging, but crucially do not have or need the flange that toilet plungers do.

To recap: cup plungers are for sinks, showers, bathtubs, and other drains. Flange and accordion plungers are for toilets. Notably, accordion plungers are slightly harder to use, but are more powerful when used correctly than their flange counterparts.

So the next time you see a cartoon, video game, or stock art depicting a cup plunger being used on a toilet, you can feel the same levels of anger and emotion that I do!

why does this have nearly 100 notes

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callmebliss

Because with this level of passion, containment is futile 

The real question is why does this not have a million notes? This is information that will very likely, at some point, be incredibly useful to anyone who has indoor plumbing. Which is, you know, probably, 99.99% of this website's user base. (I'm sure there's someone out there using Tumblr who lives in a house built in 1850 which never got upgraded and they still have an outhouse rather than toilet.)

Twelve i swear to fucking god that this post had like. 3k last week . what happened

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reblogged

Broke: Acknowledging that a character who is an objectively terrible person is also a complex and intentionally well thought out individual with different levels of nuance you can empathize with in some ways while not in others is immediately “woobifying” or “poor little meow meowifying” them.

Woke: “This character is a bad person” and “this character is still a person” are two statements that can, should and do coexist and admitting that they exhibit nuance and depth and are more than just their bad actions doesn’t immediately excuse or condone their bad actions or mean that you’re ignoring or trying to soften the canonical version of the character.

Bespoke: That’s the whole point, that’s always been the point, to be made to empathize with horrible people so you can understand that they can be anyone, that bad people can be likeable, can be interesting, can be human, are human, and it’s scary to think about all the ways they’re just like you and all the ways they’re just like everything you hate, forcing the use of critical skills in media analysis, forcing a confrontation of the duality of man.

Whatever Level is Above Bespoke: But sometimes, yeah, sure, maybe they are a poor little meow meow, what are you gonna do, get a lawyer

...Not to get weird and dark on a useful/amuzing writing post, but...

Years and years ago, I read someone's experience of finding out that his mom's boyfriend was a serial killer. How much it sickened him to put together odd bits and pieces of their experiences together, recontextualizing them, suddenly understanding new and horrifying things.

But while that was awful, what really fucked him up later wasn't the clues he'd missed or anything-- it was that, one time, they'd been working together on some kind of home project, and he'd been on a ladder and suddenly gotten off balance-- and his mom's boyfriend had immediately reached out, yanked him back, both of them frightened and swearing and then gasping in the aftershocks of panic, and how grateful he'd been that the boyfriend had been there, how they'd both started laughing as the adrenaline washed through them and out again, hugging fiercely, how grateful he still was that the boyfriend had been there, because he owed his life to this man, this almost-father that had kept him safe and had been afraid for him, and the cognitive dissonance of that, the visceral disgust and the aching love and what it meant to be beholden to a monster for the gift of that moment--

And that's why we need to practice the little lies of fiction, where we can see that characters may not always be rendered in black and white-- it helps us learn how to live in a world that may serve us the worst people we may ever know doing us the greatest kindness of our lives.

this account of "someone who was kind to me turned out to be hiding truly horrible secrets" is very close to a couple of personal experiences I’ve had, and is a big part of why I shudder when folks are like "if you do [horrible thing] you’re not human" like no, all humans have the capacity for terrible evil and great kindness

I am alive today because a horrible person did the right thing for the wrong reason.

There are far too many things in my life where I am grateful for some really messed up situations.

It’s a constant reminder that even a malfunctioning analog time piece can be right twice a day.

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wilwheaton
In knocking down President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, the right-wing Supreme Court majority does more than keep millions of American saddled with debt — it continues to shift enormous power away from Congress and the executive branch to itself. The majority — “as is becoming the norm,” Justice Elena Kagan narrates in her dissent — relies heavily on the major questions “doctrine,” a theory in vogue in right-wing legal circles. It dictates that when executive branch agencies take action of major “economic and political significance,” they lose the usual judicial deference they enjoy. That standard of significance is wholly in the eye of the beholder — an amorphousness the majority has continually taken advantage of. That has usually translated, in the hands of this conservative Court, into various Biden administration actions meeting their doom. While the Court often protests that it’s really shifting power back to Congress when it knocks down agency actions, it does so knowing that Congress is usually stalemated by various factors (split party control, the Senate filibuster) that make it extremely difficult for the legislature to pass many major laws. It also disrupts the usual separation of powers balance: Congress writes broad laws authorizing agencies to deal with issues (letting the Environmental Protection Agency regulate air pollution or the Education Department deal with federal student debt), passing on the responsibility of crafting the specifics to the expert-staffed agencies. But this Court continues to impose itself on that process, deciding that Congress didn’t meet some vague standard of specificity in its delegation and knocking down agency actions it doesn’t like. “This Court objects to Congress’s permitting the Secretary (and other agency officials) to answer so-called major questions,” Kagan writes, referring, in this case, to the Secretary of Education. “Or at least it objects when the answers given are not to the Court’s satisfaction. So the Court puts its own heavyweight thumb on the scales.”

Expand SCOTUS. Impeach and remove the corrupt Trump justices, as well as Alito and the PROFOUNDLY corrupt Thomas. Unless and until this happens, SCOTUS is a existential and direct threat to human rights and equality under the law in America.

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Climate change is real and happening faster than scientists thought.

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cleolinda

Sometimes I think we ought to start calling it “climate chaos” to get the urgency across.

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neil-gaiman

I don't know if I ever posted this shot from the desert in February 2018 of Michael and David (he's getting mic'ed up, not mugged). It was the kind of panoramic shot that decides that Michael is a big floating giant head.

Future meme

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stellucis
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wilwheaton

The GOP wonders why young people (and others) don't want to vote for them. Some wise scribe assembled this list.

1.) Your Reagan-era “trickle-down economics” strategy of tax breaks for billionaires that you continue to employ to this day has widened the gap between rich and poor so much that most of them will never be able to own a home, much less earn a living wage.

2.) You refuse to increase the federal minimum wage, which is still $7.25 an hour (since 2009). Even if it had just kept up with inflation, it would be $27 now. You’re forcing people of all ages but especially young people to work multiple jobs just to afford basic necessities.

3.) You fundamentally oppose and want to kill democracy; have done everything in your power to restrict access to the ballot box, particularly in areas with demographics that tend to vote Democratic (like young people and POC). You staged a fucking coup the last time you lost.

4.) You have abused your disproportionate senate control over the last three decades to pack the courts with religious extremists and idealogues, including SCOTUS—which has rolled back rights for women in ways that do nothing but kill more women and children and expand poverty.

5.) You refuse to enact common sense gun control laws to curb mass shootings like universal background checks and banning assault weapons; subjecting their entire generation to school shootings and drills that are traumatizing in and of themselves. You are owned by the NRA.

6.) You are unequivocally against combatting climate change to the extent that it’s as if you’ve made it your personal mission to ensure they inherit a planet that is beyond the point of no return in terms of remaining habitable for the human race beyond the next few generations.

7.) You oppose all programs that provide assistance to those who need it most. Your governors refused to expand Medicaid even during A PANDEMIC. You are against free school lunches, despite it being the only meal that millions of children can count on to actually receive each day

8.) You are banning books, defunding libraries, barring subject matter, and whitewashing history even more in a fascistic attempt to keep them ignorant of the systemic racism that this nation was literally founded upon and continues to this day in every action your party takes.

9.) You oppose universal healthcare and are still trying to repeal the ACA and rip healthcare from tens of millions of Americans and replace it with nothing. You are against lowering the cost of insulin and prescription drugs that millions need simply to LIVE/FUNCTION in society.

10.) You embrace white nationalists, Neo-Nazis, and other groups that are defined by their intractable racism, xenophobia, bigotry, and intolerance. You conspired with these groups on January 6th to try to overthrow the U.S. government via domestic terrorism that KILLED PEOPLE.

11.) You oppose every bill aimed at making life better for our nation’s youth; from education to extracurricular and financial/nutritional assistance programs. You say you want to “protect the children” while you elect/nominate pedophiles and attack trans youth and drag queens.

12.) You pretend to be offended by “anti-semitism” while literally supporting, electing, and speaking at events organized by Nazis. You pretend to hate “cancel culture” despite the fact that you invented it and it’s basically all you do.

13.) Every word you utter is a lie. You are the party of treason, hypocrisy, crime, and authoritarianism. You want to entrench rule by your aging minority because you know that you have nothing to offer young voters and they will never support you for all these reasons and more.

14.) You’re so hostile to even the notion of helping us overcome the mountain of debt that millions of us are forced to take on just to pay for our post K-12 education that you are suing to try to prevent a small fraction of us from getting even $10,000 in loan forgiveness.

15.) You opened the floodgates of money into politics via Citizens United; allowing our entire system of government to become a cesspool of corruption, crime, and greed. You are supposed to represent the American people whose taxes pay your salary but instead cater to rich donors.

16.) You respond to elected representatives standing in solidarity with their constituents to protest the ONGOING SLAUGHTER of children in schools via shootings by EXPELLING THEM FROM OFFICE & respond to your lack of popularity among young people by trying to raise the voting age.

17.) You impeach Democratic presidents over lying about a BJ but refuse to impeach (then vote twice to acquit) a guy whose entire “administration” was an international crime syndicate being run out of the WH who incited an insurrection to have you killed.

18.) You steal Supreme Court seats from democrats to prevent the only black POTUS we’ve ever had from appointing one and invent fake precedents that you later ignore all to take fundamental rights from Americans; and even your “legitimate” appointments consist of people like THIS (sub-thread refuting CJ Roberts criticisms of people attacking SCOTUS’ legitimacy).

19.) You support mass incarceration even for innocuous offenses or execution by cop for POC while doing nothing but protect rich white criminals who engage in such things as tax fraud, money laundering, sex trafficking, rape/sexual assault, falsifying business records, etc.

20.) You are the reason we can’t pass:—Universal background checks—An assault weapons ban—The ‘For the People/Freedom to vote’ Act or John Lewis Voting Rights Act—The ERA & Equality Act—The Climate Action Now Act—The (Stopping) Violence Against Women Act—SCOTUS expansion.

21.) You do not seek office to govern, represent, or serve the American people. You seek power solely for its own sake so you can impose your narrow-minded puritanical will on others at the expense of their most fundamental rights and freedoms like voting and bodily autonomy.

22.) Ok, last one. You are trying to eliminate social security and Medicare that tens of millions of our parents rely on and paid into their entire lives. And you did everything to maximize preventable deaths from COVID leaving millions of us in mourning.

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