This Is An Interesting Thing. Looks Like Testimonies Of People Who Left The MAGA Movement- How They Got

suck, and i cannot stress this enough, my cock to the fucking base

I haven't purchased a HP item in close to a decade - I use the books I already had as doorstops or to prop a laptop up for meetings nowadays.

There is NO "death of the author" with JK Rowling - she controls and continues to profit from her IP, and uses that money to fund hate groups.

Pajiba

How Many More Times Can We Say It? Your Harry Potter Addiction Is Funding Transphobia

When one person can give £70,000 to a hate group's legal funds, maybe it's time to bin the Dobby plushies.

I get a little annoyed at how writings don't give Native North American peoples any agency in agricultural technologies

Domestication takes hundreds or thousands of years to accomplish, so it's weird to me that so many sources claim that food plants native to North America were cultivated into existence after European settlement, from a "wild" ancestor into a highly desirable crop

Take for example, the famous Concord grape. Supposedly it was bred from wild ancestors in a few years by just one guy.

With pecans, the word itself is Algonquin, so it's harder to deny that Native Americans cultivated them, but supposedly "domestication began in the 1800's". and as the source says, "wild-type" pecans are perfectly acceptable for sale in the market

And then there is nonsense like all the sources that will tell you pawpaws are an "evolutionary anachronism" from when they were distributed by giant ground sloths and other megafauna, as though humans don't count.

Are we to believe that indigenous peoples knew nothing of plant breeding? When the Cherokee were given peaches, apples, and watermelon, they adopted the new plants for use in their orchards and soon developed their own breeds.

Don't even get me started on all the plants that were almost lost and largely not used anymore, like Rivercane and the American Chestnut.

Not saying anything nobody's said before, but the way Fallout is a foundationally anti-capitalist story that got turned into funkopop sci-fi pastiche slop for morons is painful to the point of brilliance. Makes its points about greed and power that much more salient.

These designs rule

dungeons and dragonites. (old art, still see it get passed around)

The Innovative Visual Style of 2000AD and how it birthed SF Comic Book Mania.

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i taught a baking class for 12 year olds today and we made your garden variety chocolate chip cookies, but i’m a big believer in Questioning Everything and the who/what/where/why/when/how behind things, so the first part of the class was purposely letting the kids do things the wrong way, to show and explain why we do things the way we do.

“why do we bake cookies at 180 for 9 minutes when we could do 400 for 2 minutes?” -enter the godawful lump of coal with a still gross wet and uncooked inside

“why do we have to scoop out little cookies instead of doing the whole tray?” -ok well that one you can technically do if the spread is even. you just end up with one giant, structurally unsound cookie. “PLEASE CAN WE MAKE GIANT COOKIES” (we did make 1 giant tray cookie)

we talked a lot about why consistency is important, but i don’t think it really hammered home until i said “okay everyone gets ONE cookie, that’s fair, right?” and then handed out cookies of hugely varying sizes. + baked one fat lump of a cookie that still wasn’t done at the 9 minutes, vs the regular one i put in that came out charred by the time the first was actually done.

we also made a row of cookies where each one had one single differing ingredient omitted, like a cookie with no flour, or a cookie with no butter, and laid them all out on a single tray to bake together to see how each ingredient affects the outcome.

two of the little girls added cocoa to their cookie doughs until it matched the colour of each others skin to make best friend cookies, and that almost made me tear up a bit 🥺

got briefly distracted (…for over half an hour…) talking about how eggs form when someone cracked an egg and it had 2 yolks

expertly tolerated being asked how old i am (just turned 31 the other day) which was immediately followed by asking if i watched the moon landing live on tv

was so focused on keeping track of all the kids that in the end i forgot to make a cookie for myself, but it’s ok because one of the girls gave me this

tiny……….

By the by, you know what's a fun and easy thing to do as you're scrolling through your social media feed and checking your messages?

If you see an ad for a fascist, one of their orgs, or any of their pet projects, report it as a malicious ad.

If you see an account rattling off fascist bullshit in the comments on whatever platform you're browsing, block it and report it as spam / bot / hate speech / misinformation as appropriate.

If you get a text or an email from one of those organizations, block the address but also flag it as phishing. Not just spam. PHISHING.

This accomplishes three things.

One, it cleans up your feed, your messaging, and your inbox.

Two, it weeds out bots and psyops accounts and General Assholes.

And three, if enough malicious ad reports and phishing flags are submitted, the companies posting the ads may have trouble posting material in the future, since their accounts may be suspended, their emails will be marked as phishing, and their ability to reach people will be reduced.

Sure, it's a small impact. Sure, it's not a guaranteed success.

But EVERY SINGLE WRENCH we can throw into the machine of fascism breaks some small part, causes some small delay, prevents things from rolling forward smooth and easy.

And the more of us that do it, the harder it will be for that machine to keep rolling.

Think of it as the online version of tearing down posters and disrupting communications.

Make them take time to create new accounts. Make the algorithms work against them. Make them have to adjust and pivot again and again. Make them spend that time and money and effort to get their propaganda through.

Nobody needs to do everything. But everyone should do something.

Keep Going.

404 Media

DOGE Employees Ordered to Stop Using Slack While Agency Transitions to a Records System Not Subject to FOIA

Employees at Elon Musk's agency have been told "OMB is asking us to stop generating new slack messages starting now."

This is enormous. Please spread this news.

FOIA is the Freedom of information Act, which allows citizen oversight of government activity. It means you can request to see government records. This is so ubiquitous that all federal employees take yearly training about it. What this means is that DOGE knows they are committing crimes as they decimate the federal workforce and compromise its systems, and so they are now moving to exempt themselves from all FOIA requirements so no one can see what they are doing.