Meme - "I FINALLY HAVE TIME TO PLAY A VIDEO GAME! I JUST NEED TO WAKE UP MY INNER CHILD! WAKE UP, LIL' DUDE! TIME TO PLAY SOME VIDEO GAMES! *dead body*"
Hillel Neuer on Twitter - "I fear Elon Musk could undermine the ideological diversity, equity and inclusion at Twitter which currently maintains a careful balance of 98.7% for one side.*Employee donations to midterm candidates by party - Twitter is second in tilt to the Democrats, with only Netflix being ahead*"
Meme - "I took a screenshot of this posted it on his fb and boom. Big mad
Juan: "What's your deal you wanna fwb
Im horny as fuck right now lol what you cant ride a dick or what
Don't like older men what up
love me some ginger right now
Bet you taste like *strawberry*
What's you got on right now silent you must be a freak
You got nothing for me
You can bring a home girl if
you want I don't mind pleasing two
What's yours fantasy
Let's make it work
You dirty as fuck for that
Wtf your problem
Nigga can't be attracted to a woman now in days huh
That's fucking funny to me how fuckin childish people now in days"
Serum cholesterol and cognitive performance in the Framingham Heart Study - "Lower naturally occurring TC levels are associated with poorer performance on cognitive measures, which place high demands on abstract reasoning, attention/concentration, word fluency, and executive functioning."
Cholesterol is not always bad
I lead a litter-picking group, but I will always defend litterers. This is why - "I investigated why people litter as part of a psychoanalytic studies MA, and found that, on an individual level, littering is a kind of revenge on society – it’s a litmus test of how people are feeling. And judging by what I see on a daily basis, many people are feeling alienated, disconnected and excluded. They are angry and are taking it out on the world. Is that any surprise, when local communities are broken or nonexistent, their deep local knowledge lost and connection to nature severed? Is that any surprise, when local communities are broken or nonexistent, their deep local knowledge lost and connection to nature severed? In a time of “polycrisis” (climate breakdown, cost of living crisis, assaults on democracy, threats to the NHS), negative feelings about the world and yourself have got to go somewhere. Nature – exposed, unprotected, wild and often neglected – is a perfect place to dump those rubbish feelings, whether that’s doing it physically with litter, or going on a walk to destress. The impulse to litter comes from a feeling that we cannot really affect the world, negatively or positively – after all, what impact can one individual have compared with a polluting company, let alone a whole polluting country? It comes from a lack of belief in the power of the individual to effect change, which in itself is rooted in feelings of despair and hopelessness. Such feelings are understandable when the scale of the environmental crisis is as staggering as it is now."
Personal responsibility is not a thing
Of course these are the same people propagating climate change hysteria, so they're creating even more problems
I am being terrorised by my robot vacuum cleaner
Potato-shaped stones are better for skimming, say experts - "Scientists have identified particular types of stone that can produce “almighty” leaps out of the water when skimmed across the surface. While aficionados of the pursuit favour thin, flat stones for long-distance skimming, the researchers’ mathematical model reveals that heavier, potato-shaped stones can achieve more dramatic results, which blast the rock into the air."
Beans in toast: UK should switch to broad bean bread, say researchers - "Britain should switch to eating bread made with broad beans, researchers have said, because it would be more sustainable and easily deliver key nutrients. Using flour made from broad beans – also known as faba or fava beans – could represent one of the biggest changes to UK food in a generation, according to scientists at the University of Reading."
I'll be more dangerous, more beautiful than any other - "idk who needs to hear this but when your english teacher asks you to explain why an author chose to use a specific metaphor or literary device, it’s not because you won’t be able to function in real-world society without the essential knowledge of gatsby’s green light or whatever, it’s because that process develops your abilities to parse a text for meaning and fill in gaps in information by yourself, and if you’re wondering what happens when you DON’T develop an adult level of reading comprehension, look no further than the dizzying array of examples right here on tumblr dot com
this post went from 600 to 2400 notes in the time it took me to write 3 emails. i’m already terrified for what’s going to happen in there
k but also, as an addendum, the reason we study literary analysis is because everything an author writes has meaning, whether it was intentional or not, and their biases and agendas are often reflected in their choice of language and literary devices and so forth! and that ties directly into being able to identify, for example, the racist and antisemitic dogwhistles often employed by the right wing, or the subconscious word choices that can unintentionally illustrate someone’s bias or blind spot. LANGUAGE HAS WEIGHT AND MEANING! the way we communicate is a reflection of our inner selves, and that’s true regardless of whether it’s a short story or a novel or a blog post or a tweet. instead of taking a piece of writing at face value and stopping there, assuming that there is no deeper meaning or thought behind the words on the page, ask yourself these two questions instead:
1. what is the author trying to say?
2. what does the author maybe not realize they’re saying?
because the most interesting reading of any piece of literature, imho, usually occupies the space in between those questions."
Literature is useful to pretend other people mean something they didn't, that they are dog whistling, and fascism is a huge threat so you need to imprison all your political enemies. But perhaps the most interesting thing about a literary interpretation is what it says about the interpreter
Sometimes the curtains are just blue - "I’ve reached a certain milestone in my writerly career; my writing has been misinterpreted. A recent review in Strange Horizons found in a story of mine a much deeper meaning than I originally intended... I meant it to be about addiction and self delusion (the repetition of “She could quit any time she wanted” in the story.) It’s a story about the lies we tell ourselves about our bad habits and destructive behavior. That is all. But someone found something completely different in it... [left wing drivel]... I just find it interesting to be at the receiving end of something Stephen King described in his excellent book, On Writing, when he mentions that Literature professors sometimes read deeply into the meaning of blue curtains in a book, suggesting that the author meant to convey the main characters distance from his mother (I forget exactly what it was) when all the author meant to say was that the curtains were blue."
Why Are The Curtains Blue?
Comment: "The much funnier thing to me is how they largely ruin their own point with the story. Their description of the curtains is quite flowery and they spend 3 sentences to evoke the appropriate emotions. This is the literary equivalent of focusing the camera. You’re intentionally drawn to pay attention to and imagine the curtains. You’re effectively told the emotions you’re supposed to be feeling. Compare that to “The curtains were blue.” Slapped in the middle of a paragraph, or even the beginning or end of one, the line is going to be glossed over by virtually every single reader. Because it is generally irrelevant data and honestly poor writing in most cases. If you simply assign a color and expect it to evoke emotion, it’s not going to work because readers will all have different emotions and thoughts tied to that color. The red in the Sixth Sense works because the film gives it meaning. You don’t automatically know that red = ghost. Hell you’re not supposed to know until the end of the film and then suddenly you have all the information to put it together... In the end, we don’t really know if the author specifically picked the color for the emotion, if they threw a dart at a color wheel or simply thought it fit the color scheme pictured in their mind. But if you’ve ever taken literary courses in college, you’ve probably run into the professor that insists the curtains have to be blue for a fucking reason or that the clown costume in Cask of Amontillado means more than the narrator thought that guy was an idiot. Stephen King talks about this concept in his book “On Writing”…
In the end, it’s one thing to have your interpretation of things, we all will and do. I love it when someone points out something in a book or film and explains what it means to them. It’s a whole other thing to demand everyone see the same symbolism or to assume that’s what the author meant. Hell, it’s not cool to even expect everyone to see any symbolism in specific stuff at all. Because things don’t always have to mean shit."
"more relevant is the subversion of Checkov’s gun. The theory that the gun needs to be fired misses the subtler method of having the gun hanging on the wall because it isn’t necessary to have it on a character’s hip; or it misleads a character to believe it is there as a weapon instead of decor; or a thousand other possibilities. I don’t think Checkov was being literal when he shared his rule."
King didn't exactly say that, but he said something similar when he wrote that "[symbolism] can actually hurt, especially if you get carried away. Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create a sense of artificial profundity"
Facebook cuts off NYU researcher access, prompting rebuke from lawmakers - "Facebook shut down accounts belonging to two academic researchers late Tuesday, cutting off their ability to study political ads and misinformation on the world’s biggest social network. The company accused the academics of engaging in “unauthorized scraping” and compromising user privacy on the platform, claims that Facebook’s many critics are slamming as a thin pretense for killing the transparency work."
From 2021
The self-defeating rage of Owen Jones - "Another week in the life of Guardian columnist Owen Jones, and another splurge of Twitch-hunting. Why does he do it? YouTubing sectarian Jones was once close to the heart of the Labour Party’s campaigning team, with a realistic hope of being on good terms with a Corbyn-led government. But that was not to be. Despite Jones’ sterling advice, Corbynism failed in the General Election of 2017 and then failed harder in the General Election of 2019. Jones’ faction of the Labour Party has suffered a remarkably swift downward spiral from government-to-be, to two-time losers, to ousted faction, to despised minority, and even to potential expellees, in just five years. Denied the keys to the kingdom (or at least its communications department), Jones has filled his time by waging increasingly futile and unpleasant Twitter spats with anyone who offends his own eccentric worldview. In recent times, Owen’s rage seems to have been in large part directed at women writers of a certain age (forgive me for saying it) who take issue with gender ideology. This week Jones got into a tizzy about columnist Sarah Ditum, who dared to express a view about the late Terry Pratchett’s work and what it might have said about trans rights. Suggesting Ditum was an ‘unpleasant weird person’ was Owen’s helpful contribution. It was Jones’ sniping at gender-critical feminists that encouraged right-wing columnist Douglas Murray to suggest that maybe Jones did indeed have a problem with women... much of Jones’ self-published minimum opus is given over to ad hominem attacks on Murray, which have no bearing whatsoever on the question at hand – that is, Jones’ alleged ‘problem’ with women. Instead, Jones raises a series of non sequiturs about Murray’s other views about Islam, Hungary, France and immigration – none of which has anything to do with the issues that Murray raised in his column... On Murray’s substantive point — that Jones has a peculiar issue with women — Jones just flails around, suggesting first that, no, he has not said loads of horrid things about Ditum, JK Rowling and former Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore, but that also, if he did, they probably deserved it. Of the last, Suzanne Moore, Jones says that he was indeed proud to have signed a petition of Guardian staff and writers, decrying the paper’s publication of ‘anti-trans views’ – which Moore cites as part of what pushed her to resign. But at the same time he claims that he and his colleagues had nothing to do with Moore’s departure and that she is a liar anyway... it would have cost Jones nothing to say, ‘No, Douglas, I genuinely disagree on these issues’, rather than say ‘you’re right-wing, and they’re horrid liars’. For whatever reason, that is not how Jones operates. He seems to engage in public discussion not to understand or clarify an issue, but to berate or reward people. Everything is personal. It is a peculiarly unrewarding way to operate that only accumulates personal animosity. But then, as Freddie deBoer explained in a recently republished article, the sectarian is not interested in enlarging his faction’s influence in society, only in deepening his influence over the faction, even when that means that faction is dug into ever less popular positions"
From 2021
Man who raped girl, 13, given community sentence - "A man who raped a 13-year-old schoolgirl in a park when he was 17 has avoided a prison sentence. Sean Hogg, 21, attacked the girl in Dalkeith Country Park, Midlothian, on various occasions between March and June 2018. Judge Lord Lake said that if the offence had been committed by an adult over 25, Hogg would have received a jail sentence of four or five years. Instead he was ordered to do 270 hours of unpaid work. Court papers stated Hogg, of Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, threatened the girl, seized her by the wrists and forced her to carry out a sex act before raping her... New guidelines for sentencing under 25s were introduced in Scotland in January 2022. They made rehabilitation rather than punishment a primary consideration, recommending an "individualistic approach" taking into account their life experiences"
Meme - "your cooking is underseasoned lol"
"your country is under-developed lol"
Meme - "Definitely Not Commie Gibberish of the Day
> literally first time at the restaurant
> already brought her Walmart jumbo $7 "Mixed SeasoningTM" tub
> pours it on before trying any food
> "y'all culture don't season y'all food >
"respect my culture though""
"Took my Nigerian aunty to Korean bbq for the first time and she had to bring her own seasoning"
Meme - Racial Consciousness: "They carry around plastic bottles of industrially produced spices. They don't manufacture those spices themselves. Hell, they don't have the slightest fucking clue as to how those spices are even made. But they feel superior to you because they pour that powder on everything."
Of course, if it were a white person dumping "seasoning" on Korean BBQ, this would be racist and proof of white supremacy
Meme - "Hi do you still go fishing on sunday?"
"Yeh i do why?"
"There is an app called plenty of fish my husband has it to meet fishing buddies. Thought I tell you about it."
"Oh ffs Cristine are you for real?"
"Seriously it's not a joke i will ask him to send you a link to it.Its really good he finds someone to go with almost every weekend."
Meme - "Don't text Samantha again"
"Whos this?"
"Her boyfriend. Don't text her again. U dont want a problem with me"
"Bro she's my coworker, I just need her to take my shift next week"
"Idc. Ill make ur life hard kid. My bench is 315 and deadlift is 405
Im 6'3 and I used to wrestle 2. ill break ur tiny arms"
Meme - "My mom typing H in the search bar"
"How to cook pasta"
Hentai: "You wanna get to him? You gotta go through me."
How to seduce my mom like in porn: "And me."
Meme - "When all I want to do all day is masturbate but everyone is waiting for me to post hilarious memes
With great power comes great responsibility. This is my gift. This is my curse"
The oldest PC games still getting updated today - "These games have, against all odds, managed to withstand the test of time. They're still being worked on after 20 and even 30 years, and all of them have had updates in 2018"
Titan A.E.: An animated bomb that wasn’t even supposed to be animated - "Even without production woes, Titan A.E. is a tricky movie to love. In previous iterations of this series, we’ve looked at the split in genre in this era of animation, with some films leaning sharply in the comedic direction, and others delving into sci-fi and action. Titan A.E. is firmly in the latter category, even more so than Treasure Planet or The Iron Giant: it’s dark and gritty, and the directors take the story very seriously. While Treasure Planet, The Iron Giant, and Atlantis: The Lost Empire still felt similar in scope and message of the sweeping fantasies that defined the Disney Renaissance, Titan A.E. is a hard science-fiction movie, using animation as a medium rather than a genre. While that doesn’t necessarily spell box-office doom, the American mindset then (and to this day) associates Western animation with a family-friendly tone and story... Titan A.E. came out to mixed reception from critics, who called it a hodge-podge of other science-fiction movies. But one response was near-universal: it looked great. In fact, it looks so good that it’s easy to wonder why more science fiction isn’t animated. Unlike 2002’s Treasure Planet, which reimagines space travel, Titan A.E. sticks to a tried-and-true expectation of how we imagine humanity will take to the stars. The locations — especially the space stations, like the junkyard where Cale works at the beginning of the movie, and New Bangkok, where dispersed human drifters have built a colony — feel lifted from media like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5. But instead of being rendered with clunky setpieces and special effects that don’t hold up after 20 years, Titan A.E.’s animation still seems fresh, and the planets, ships, and space scenes look dynamic and captivating... The plot isn’t particularly groundbreaking, and the characters aren’t particularly original. But while they’re a bit cliché for science fiction, they are striking when it comes to mainstream Western animation. Following more adult characters and dealing with the possible end of humanity, as mankind struggles to find its way in the vast expanse of outer space, is a far cry from the usual Disney musicals, centered on teenagers journeying toward self-acceptance and romance."
How chefs are reinventing Chinese-Canadian cuisine - The Globe and Mail - ""I'll be honest, my first encounter with a sweet-and-sour chicken ball was probably in university after we'd gone out for a drink," he says. "I couldn't associate it with Chinese food because I was used to eating that food at home. I thought it was delicious, though, and I didn't care that it wasn't really Chinese."... This country's greatest contribution to the Chinese culinary canon, as anyone in the Prairies can tell you, is ginger beef. Marinated beef, dredged in a corn-starch-heavy batter, deep-fried and served in a sweet-and-sour sauce may sound more like something you'd eat off a stick at a local fair, but make no mistake, it is one of the greatest things ever cooked. Simultaneously crisp and yielding, spicy and sweet with the chili heat accentuated by a slight ginger burn, the dish is now ubiquitous in Western Canada and has even spawned a chain of restaurants in Calgary named Ginger Beef. Naturally, with something so delicious, there is some debate about who first invented it. While the combination of beef with ginger is common in China and around the world, it wasn't until one George Wong, chef at Calgary's Silver Inn Restaurant in the late 1970s, brought batter and a deep fryer into the equation that the dish we now recognize as ginger beef was born. Wong's Chinese heritage and experience cooking in British pubs – where the emphasis on battering and deep-frying inspired ginger beef – may make him the world's first fusion chef."
Sex inspectors targeting tourists in Bali? Don’t worry about it, Indonesia says | South China Morning Post - "Indonesian officials are trying to dispel concerns that a new law banning extramarital sex might ruin foreign tourists’ holidays in Bali. The Southeast Asian nation’s parliament passed legislation last week approving jail terms of up to a year for anybody in Indonesia caught having sex outside wedlock... “There will be no checks on marital status upon check-in at any tourism accommodation … nor inspections by public officials or community groups,” he said. Businesses have voiced worries that the sweeping overhaul of the criminal code will be detrimental to tourism in Indonesia, which received more than 16 million visitors in 2019... He said extramarital sex and cohabitation offences would only be prosecuted if a spouse, parent or child reported it, while adultery had already been illegal for years under the previous criminal code... Indonesian officials say the code aims to uphold “Indonesian values” in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation... Andreas Harsono, a senior Human Rights Watch researcher in Indonesia, said last week that the code “contains oppressive and vague provisions that open the door to invasions of privacy and selective enforcement that will enable the police to extort bribes, lawmakers to harass political opponents, and officials to jail ordinary bloggers”"
Moderate Islam means targeting locals, not foreigners
History of chickens: how the bird became world’s primary protein source and a food favourite | South China Morning Post - "Until the late 19th century, chicken was not considered a mainstay meat; beef, pork and mutton were preferred. But as time wore on, the ease and speed of chicken breeding, the convenience of the fowl’s size – enough to feed one small family with no leftovers – and the tastiness and wide variety of chicken meals won over legions of supporters... Emelyn Rude, the author of Tastes Like Chicken: A History of America’s Favourite Bird, says technological advances in factory farming for all species boosted poultry production around the world. These advances, she says, transformed chicken from the most expensive, most difficult-to-cook meat in the market to easy, cheap and healthy sustenance... The chicken’s final victory came in recent decades, in the 1960s and ’70s, when health authorities around the world began warning against overindulging in red meat – beef and pork – and suggesting consumers instead try leaner meat, like fish and chicken. Yet the health promotion largely backfired in terms of chicken, Rude says. “Despite the emphasis on health, most of this increased consumption came in the form of processed chicken – the nuggets and chicken burgers of the world.”"
Chinese kung fu ‘masters’ told to clean up act and stop bringing shame to traditional martial arts | South China Morning Post - "In the past few years, practitioners have hyped fights for financial or personal gain, which has brought a lot of controversy... A number of videos have gone viral of tai chi “masters” being badly beaten in actual fights, primarily with modern-day mixed martial arts practitioners. Mixed martial arts fighter Xu Xiaodong has been on a crusade to expose fake martial arts masters... Arguably, the most well-known MMA fighter in China, who has been on a crusade to expose fake martial arts masters, is maverick Xu Xiaodong. Nicknamed “Mad Dog”, he has taken a number of fights with various practitioners and subsequently been blacklisted in his home country... The CWA is asking martial arts practitioners not to appoint themselves as “kung fu masters”, “authentic masters” or “legacy inheritors” and not to fake any documents or certificates related to their training or “alleged prowess”."
Does Mouse Utopia Exist? - "Did John Calhoun’s1960s Mouse Utopia really show that animal (and human) populations will expand to arbitrary densities, creating socially-driven pathology and collapse? I give reasons for doubt about its replicability, interpretation, and meaningfulness.One of the most famous experiments in psychology & sociology was John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiments in the 1960s–1970s. In the usual telling, Mouse Utopia created ideal mouse environments in which the mouse population was permitted to increase as much as possible; however, the overcrowding inevitably resulted in extreme levels of physical & social dysfunctionality, and eventually population collapse & even extinction. Looking more closely into it, there are reasons to doubt the replicability of the growth & pathological behavior & collapse of this utopia (“no-place”), and if it does happen, whether it is driven by the social pressures as claimed by Calhoun or by other causal mechanisms at least as consistent with the evidence like disease or mutational meltdown... Mouse Utopia is a legendary experiment in which mice were put in a high-density enclosure (“Universe 25”) with unlimited food, a ‘mouse utopia’—only to see the initial population growth be followed by a population collapse generations later, while the late mouse population exhibited bizarre physical & social abnormalities such as autistic-like behavior & homosexuality & failure to reproduce. Mouse Utopia is interpreted as illustrating the damaging effects of the environment & overcrowding by John B. Calhoun and others... Overall, Mouse Utopia is a sketchy and unreliable result: it is selectively and scantily reported, it is unclear how often the claimed behavioral sinks or population collapses happen even just within Calhoun’s experiments, whether any such problems are due to exogenously-forced density increases rather than the colonies naturally regulating population density close to their optimum, the few replications replicate only parts of it (if at all), it is entirely possible that it is a fluke of that particular mouse colony or mouse strain, and if the experiment ever was replicated exactly (assuming the unpublished materials are adequately informative), it would be unclear what the actual causal mechanism of the collapse would be as the design & analysis is ambiguous and Calhoun tested no hypotheses (much less the most likely ones of disease or genetics, which he resolutely ignored). I am left confused what happened in Mouse Utopia, to what extent it reflects any real natural dynamics involving population growth & density, and extremely doubtful of the perennial attempt to link it to humans."
