ive been to a lot of protests in my life and a thing that a lot of people dont understand is that a protest is a threat. its a large group of people saying “we are being nice now, but you must understand that if we stop being nice we have the power to cause you Problems”.
so everyone saying that protests have to be more polite or follow accepted rules is missing the entire point. the point of a protest is not to say “we disagree with you”, they already know that. the point of a protest is to make it clear that if they continue to do things you disagree with, you will burn down their house.
now this wont stop them because theyre stupid and arrogant and believe themselves to be beyond consequence. so here’s the really important thing and that’s that after they do it anyway, you have to burn down their house
Mayhem, Maybe
Ramblings of a sometimes bouncy, often sleepy, eternally distractable child-wrangler, with her nose in a book and her head in the clouds
Cis, white, able bodied- she/her pronouns :)
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2022-05-12 32,887 notes
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32,887 notes
ive been to a lot of protests in my life and a thing that a lot of people dont understand is that a protest is a threat. its a large group of people saying “we are being nice now, but you must understand that if we stop being nice we have the power to cause you Problems”.
so everyone saying that protests have to be more polite or follow accepted rules is missing the entire point. the point of a protest is not to say “we disagree with you”, they already know that. the point of a protest is to make it clear that if they continue to do things you disagree with, you will burn down their house.
now this wont stop them because theyre stupid and arrogant and believe themselves to be beyond consequence. so here’s the really important thing and that’s that after they do it anyway, you have to burn down their house
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12,253 notes
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2022-04-04 62,314 notes
a-sumac-is-a-sumac-is-a-sumac:
ways to respond to being asked “are you a man or a woman?”
- i sure hope not
- who’s to say
- that’s between me and God
- i’ll tell you for $100
- i don’t think so, why?
- probably, not sure though
additions collected from the notes
- not to my knowledge
- sometimes
- wouldn’t you like to know weatherboy
Does it matter?
That’s not relevant to you.
I beg your pardon?!
In this economy?
Am I a what? [they repeat it, assuming you hadn’t heard] What are those?
pretending you’ve simply never heard of this “gender” nonsense would be such a power move
(via mandywondering)
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103,501 notes
bootyshorts with this printed on them
“You give up a few things, chasing a dream.”
You wouldn’t get this on other websites
(via mandywondering)
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495,475 notes
we are already living in the cyberpunk future and i know this because within a span of 3 days we went from this tweet:
to thousands of people making phony images and replying to them with their passionate desire to have them as a tshirt to overload the bots with nonsense and junk and send out warnings to shoppers like this:
and now we even have people replying to pictures of baby yoda with “i want this on a tshirt” knowing how ravenous disney is being with copyright in hopes to get the stores taken down altogether
i dont know what it is about stuff like this and the whole turn mei into a symbol of hk protesters thing but, its really reassuring for some reason
And the next step…
Holy shit y’all look at the front page of the site right now
Oh my god
Anyway, I just emailed tips@disneyantipiracy.com to report the site for very evilly stealing Disney’s IP! Because obviously that is very evil and bad and shit.
I’ve never seen such a perfect example of fighting fire with fire.
Holy fucking shit
I’m DYING.
😂😂😂
More accurately
The next generation…
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2021/10/nft-bots-tshirt-online-twitter-war/
This is like a “you gotta get a box of cheese, a mouse, and a cat across the river” puzzle except the goal is to get them all to eat each other somehow
Trolley problem but you try to maximize the kill count
(via watchingthenightsky)
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2022-03-26 18,655 notes
i feel like every activist should read about fruitlands.
fruitlands was a transcendentalist utopian commune founded in the 1840s. the founders (including louisa may alcott’s dad) thought that the existing capitalist economy was evil: alcott described it as a tree “whose root is selfishness, whose trunk is property, whose fruit is gold.“ so they decided to create a commune that was completely divorced from the economy. like, their response to the "you say you’re against capitalism but still participate in it! checkmate socialists!” people was literally “you’re right, let’s not!”
they refused to consume any materials or foods that couldn’t be locally grown, like tea or sugar. they were also highkey vegan: not only was it immoral to eat animal products and use animals for leather and wool, but using animal labor or even using manure as fertilizer was forbidden. and they refused to trade for anything they didn’t have within the commune because participation in an oppressive economy was bad, especially if it supported slave labor (ex: wearing cotton fabric).
it fell apart in less than a year because they didn’t have enough food to survive the winter.
why?
well, part of it was circumstantial: the site they picked had little arable land and they arrived a month behind in the planting schedule. part of it was the impracticality of living in the 1840s and being so vegan that they couldn’t even use oxen to plough their fields or wear clothes that were warm in cold weather.
but the main reason was that the men of the commune (and they were almost all men, except for alcott’s wife and another woman, ann page) didn’t actually, like, do anything. they left all the household chores and childcare to the women, plus most of the farm work, while they sat around and philosophized about how cool their utopia was. even before it fell apart, most people there had began taking “vacations” away from fruitlands so that they could take hot baths and avoid trying to till the soil with their bare hands.
there are a lot of good lessons here.
1. it’s very easy to talk about your great ideas for society but putting them into practice is much harder. you have to actually do the work to achieve the goal: you can’t shunt it off onto other people based on the same oppressive systems you’re trying to subvert.
2. you need to consider the practical implications of what you’re arguing for, including potential downsides. banning wool for ethical reasons is all well and good until you’re stuck wearing linen clothes and canvas shoes in the middle of a massachusetts winter.
3. you can’t expect that a utopia is going to be all the things you like about society staying the same and everything you dislike being changed. that is at best naïve and at worst intensely selfish.
tl;dr: talk is cheap, praxis is hard.
Or as one of my favourite Tumblr posts puts it:
“Yes he’s well versed in Leftist Theory, but does he do the dishes?”
(via ukulelekatie)
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434,298 notes
A man is driving down the road and breaks down near a monastery. He goes to the monastery, knocks on the door, and says, “My car broke down. Do you think I could stay the night?”
The monks graciously accept him, feed him dinner, even fix his car. As the man tries to fall asleep, he hears a strange sound.
The next morning, he asks the monks what the sound was, but they say, “We can’t tell you. You’re not a monk.”
The man is disappointed but thanks them anyway and goes about his merry way.
Some years later, the same man breaks down in front of the same monastery.
The monks accept him, feed him, even fix his car. That night, he hears the same strange noise that he had heard years earlier.
The next morning, he asks what it is, but the monks reply, “We can’t tell you. You’re not a monk.”
The man says, “All right, all right. I’m *dying* to know. If the only way I can find out what that sound was is to become a monk, how do I become a monk?”
The monks reply, “You must travel the earth and tell us how many blades of grass there are and the exact number of sand pebbles. When you find these numbers, you will become a monk.”
The man sets about his task. Forty-five years later, he returns and knocks on the door of the monastery. He says, “I have traveled the earth and have found what you have asked for. There are 145,236,284,232 blades of grass and 231,281,219,999,129,382 sand pebbles on the earth.”
The monks reply, “Congratulations. You are now a monk. We shall now show you the way to the sound.”
The monks lead the man to a wooden door, where the head monk says, “The sound is right behind that door.”
The man reaches for the knob, but the door is locked. He says, “Real funny. May I have the key?”
The monks give him the key, and he opens the door.
Behind the wooden door is another door made of stone.
The man demands the key to the stone door.
The monks give him the key, and he opens it, only to find a door made of ruby.
He demands another key from the monks, who provide it.
Behind that door is another door, this one made of sapphire.
So it went until the man had gone through doors of emerald, silver, topaz, and amethyst.
Finally, the monks say, “This is the last key to the last door.”
The man is relieved to no end.
He unlocks the door, turns the knob, and behind that door he is amazed to find the source of that strange sound.
But I can’t tell you what it is because you’re not a monkBWAHAHAHAHAH.
the way i learned this, it was always told through spoken word. And you’d do the door thing for ages. AGES. literally just making up any old material. ‘behind the foam door is a door made of spinach’ that kind of shit. Go on until whoever is listening has already begged you to stop and has now gone on to pleading, clutching your shirt on their knees pleading. And when you finally said the last line? People went fucking nuts Like there was a good chance of just getting the teeth knocked out of you after telling that joke.
A friend of mine did that shit for 30 minutes on a camp once. The entire fucking bus just exploded in anger when she finished. It was a fucking massacre.
(via kayloulee)
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117,087 notes
Not apocalyptic levels of OhFuck unless you’ve sat through a Cat5, but shit’s been like this for a long time now. We just put up with it for far too fucking long:
Me: I need to go home. There’s a hurricane coming and my basement apartment is on the coast, so I’m worried about my cats. (To myself: And maybe needing to evacuate.)
Boss: Is your house and your cats more important than this job?
Me: YES.
Boss: …oh. Okay. Uh…see you tomorrow…
Different boss, several years later, a conversation that happened multiple times:
Me: Hey, it’s starting to really snow outside, I live on a steep hill, and I only have 2-wheel drive. If I don’t leave now, I can’t get home.
Boss: Is getting home more important than getting your job done tonight?
Me: Considering I value my life more than I value this paperwork being digitized? YES.
Boss: ….
Me: Bye. See you tomorrow.
Boss: Uh, yeah, okay.
Different atttempt:
Boss: Why don’t you just get a hotel after work?
Me: Do I get a raise so I can afford it?
Boss: No.
Me: Bye. See you tomorrow.
Boss: Is getting home
more important than getting
your job done tonight?
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Haikubot aside we should normalize saying those things to bosses absolutely. It’s only going to get worse.
Haikubot aside? Haikubot is right, we should say it in haiku.
(via watchingthenightsky)
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2022-03-09 37,255 notes
One of the best and most helpful things anyone ever said to me was: Don’t advertise your mistakes.
You will often notice when you’ve made an error, or when there’s something you could have done better, or etc, and sometimes other people will notice too. But often, they won’t. So don’t point it out.
It’s really a sign of a lack of self confidence – you think that if you point out the error first, it will save someone else from having to point it out for you. That by being self-depreciating, no one else will feel obliged to point out your flaws.
But here’s the thing. People don’t notice jack shit, most of the time. Sure, yeah, sometimes you’ll fuck up and people will notice and mention it, and thats fine, but 95% of your errors will go unnoticed. Unless you choose to point them out, in which case, you ensure that 100% of your errors get noticed.
The above sentence was said to me during a dance rehearsal. I’m not a pro dancer by any stretch of the imagination – this was a fun little between-friends dance that we were going to perform at a medium sized function full of people we knew. Half the people in the group did have dance experience, which made me - a non-dancer - feel self concious. So every time I messed up the steps, I would laugh at myself or made an “agh” sound or be verbally frustrated with myself that I was struggling to get that move, or whatever. Which drew peoples attention to the fact that I’d made an error.
There were like 10 of us doing this dance; me missing one step went largely unnoticed in the scheme of things, because with ten of us, anyone watching the dance had so much to look at that the likelihood of them seeing me misstep was extremely low. Unless I made a big deal about it, which would draw their attention to me, and ensure that they were made aware.
I used to point out my mistakes all the time. Not just with the dance, but across the board in general life, too. “Agh, whoops,” or handing over a completed project like “I know I could have done [thing] better, but hopefully the rest is ok,” or whatever. People were often frustrated with me, and I feel, in hindsight, that they were frustrated with me because in their eyes, with me constantly highlighting my own errors, they knew I could do better but instead here I was, giving them a shoddy, half-assed, error-filled effort. By me pointing out my every mistake, they were aware of how many I was making, and they were frustrated by my seemingly endless errors.
Then I got told to “stop advertising your mistakes,” and it was a bit of a revelation moment for me. I made a concious effort that day to minimise my reaction to my own mistakes – for the rest of the rehearsal and into the final performance – and you know what happened??
After the performance, countless people said some iteration of the phrase, “I didn’t know you could dance!!”
They thought I was a dancer. That I’d been dancing for years. They hadn’t noticed any of my missteps.
I messed up multiple times during the final performance. If I watch the recording and focus on me, I can see my missed steps, the time I span clockwise on the spot instead of anticlockwise, the time I was slightly out of alignment with the other dancers, etc. But if I watch the dance as a whole, watching all 10 dancers instead of just me….. I dont notice the mistakes I made. They blend in. Theres too much other stuff going on for anyone to notice the one dancer who spun on the spot in the opposite direction to everyone else.
And everyone thought i was brilliant. All I noticed, while dancing, were my mistakes, but no one else saw them, and everyone who saw the dance was super impressed with it and with me. That would not have been the case had I reacted to every one of my errors as I’d made them.
So I took that concept and applied it to the rest of my life. And you know what???? People were less frustrated with me. Because they weren’t noticing my minor errors, and I wasn’t pointing them out any more, so from their perspective, it looked like my output had improved. It looked like I was making “less errors.” I wasn’t, its just that before, I was pointing every one of them out, and now, I was letting people notice them on their own. And they didnt notice them.
You are always going to be hyperaware of yourself and your own mistakes, but other people are way too distracted by their own crap and have too much other stuff drawing their attention to notice your every misstep. So stop pointing your mistakes out. Stop being your own worst critic. Everyone fucks up now and then, its fine. You fix the error if you can, and you move on. You dont have to pre-empt someone else pointing out your mistakes, because its extremely likely that they wont notice your errors. Unless you point them out.
So stop advertising your mistakes, people.
(via durnesque-esque)
