shapeshift!

A billionaire who accuses his adversaries of being paid shills, while simultaneously offering people $1,000 to cast ballots for his preferred candidate, is telling you everything you need to know about how popular he thinks his own views are, and how many people would support them without bribes.

This is why you always follow the money.

i'll be honest thinking about las vegas makes me nauseous.

like this shouldnt be possible.

My drunk ass aimed my phone inside a chip bag and the flash reflected hardcore and got this crazy unedited photo

Hold up, is this possibly the explanation for:

That's probably how this picture of my dog happened gsjhdjdb

why is your dog made of metal and/or tin foil

This is the post that keeps on giving

this photo of my dog in my backyard on tile

Amazing

Antique Sterling and Amethyst Beetle Brooch, with Garnet Eyes, C Clasp

as a cis-passing guy i dared to ask the question "how femme can i be be before my coworkers get uncomfortable" and the answer is apparently. a single gold dangling earring

happy tdov never kill yourself

i hated being 15 and wanted to die too, or at least have something change. now that i can look back, i can identify what, specifically, gets "better:"

-at 15 you have almost no control over your schedule, including sleep. the school system demands a sleep/wake cycle that's extremely unnatural and difficult to keep even for normal teenagers, and amounts to constant sleep deprivation (a form of torture) for nightowl teenagers. constant sleep deprivation or even just chronic disregulation fucks with your entire body, your hormones, and your mental health. it makes everything worse.

-as an adult, a lot of jobs do expect you to be a morning person, but at least your body is more likely to cooperate with a 9-5 work/sleep schedule, and you're also more free to take second shift or night shift work that suits you. as an adult you need less sleep than teenagers and have fewer authority figures in your life to get in the way of when and how much you nap.

-at 15 if you attend any school other than homeschooling, you're basically in jail that's also hell. everyone is a similar age to you and going through similar, or worse, problems, and they're going to take it out on everyone around them. you have very little ability to get away from bullies, and you're just fucked when your bullies are your teachers, your parents, your parents' friends. if you're attending homeschooling, you trade an inescapably crowded and stressful social situation for an inescapably isolated social situation, one where your parents have absolute authority over every part of your life. a solitary prison is even worse than crowded one.

-as an adult, a dysfunctional and abusive workplace has a huge impact on your mental and physical health, and many people do die or kill themselves because of a degrading and terrible job. however, as an adult, you're likely to have more power to chose your workplace, it's likely to be a shorter and less rigorous day than highschool+homework, and you get paid for it. plus, a good job is extremely empowering and satisfying.

-at 15 your body is growing and you need large, regular, balanced meals. lots of 15 year olds skip breakfast and have shitty lunches, because school is terrible. lots of 15 year olds have food insecurity or are on diets, either chosen or imposed, and this makes them depressed and emotionally volatile. at 15, you probably don't have very much positive control over your meals, since your parents are in charge of groceries and meal prep. just negative control, by skipping or refusing. replacing meals with soda or candy is also a problem-- your body craves a big hit of sugar at all times, because you're growing, but replacing meals and sleep with soda just leads to more disregulation. teens can easily get into really dysfunctional cycles this way.

-as an adult you have more time to eat and more control over what you eat. you have your own salary and make your own shopping lists. as an adult you're also not going through growth spurts anymore: your body grows and maintains itself through its whole life, but it's steadier. you work out what you like and you know how to get it.

IN CONCLUSION: at 15 you're depressed for a lot of good reasons. if someone has a grueling and unrewarding schedule that traps them with other miserable people all day, subject to hostile authority figures with no escape, and they're expected to do lots of work with few rewards and frequent punishment, they're going to be miserable. this is further compounded when a person has a rapidly growing body that can't possibly get a healthy amount of nourishment and rest. these are the conditions that reliably cause depression.

as an adult, we're telling you "it gets better" because in about four years you will be free of so much of what's making you miserable right now. to eat food you like, to rest as much as you need, to work a paying job or chase your own dreams, to decide what kind of life you want to live. it might not sound like much, but it's everything.

To add a possibly different perspective, when I was fifteen I was depressed (because of undiagnosed neurodivergence) because I believed I wouldn’t be able to be a functioning adult. What got better for me was realizing that a lot of what I was afraid of turned out to be easier than I expected once I had done it enough times.

Like, trying new things is still sometimes scary for me. But now that I have more life experience (and better coping mechanisms), things like making/going to doctors appointments without help, working a full time job, or handling money and dealing with banks are a lot less intimidating. The first time I did them I was terrified, but it got easier and easier until now it’s just part of life and I’m chill about it.

I was depressed because I didn’t feel like I’d been taught to handle adulthood, and I was kind of right, because there’s a lot of things that we aren’t explicitly taught (and maybe we should be). But now I’ve done a lot of the stereotypical ‘adult stuff’ enough times to be able to trust myself to handle unexpected things. That’s carried over into the rest of my life, and I’ve become a less anxious person because of it. I think teenage me would be proud.

op turned off reblogs but i wanted this on my blog so i screenshotted it

Yeah.

Private-sector Trumpism

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on WEDNESDAY (Apr 2), and in BLOOMINGTON on FRIDAY (Apr 4). More tour dates here.

Trumpism is a mixture of grievance, surveillance, and pettiness: "I will never forgive your mockery, I have records of you doing it, and I will punish you and everyone who associates with you for it." Think of how he's going after the (cowardly) BigLaw firms:

https://abovethelaw.com/2025/03/skadden-makes-100-million-settlement-with-trump-in-pro-bono-payola/

Trump is the realization of decades of warning about ubiquitous private and public surveillance – that someday, all of this surveillance would be turned to the systematic dismantling of human rights and punishing of dissent.

23 years ago, I was staying in London with some friends, scouting for a flat to live in. After at day in town, I came back and we ordered a curry and had a nice chat. I mentioned how discomfited I'd been by all the CCTV cameras that had sprouted at the front of every private building, to say nothing of all the public cameras installed by local councils and the police. My friend dismissed this as a kind of American, hyper-individualistic privacy purism, explaining that these cameras were there for public safety – to catch flytippers, vandals, muggers, boy racers tearing unsafely through the streets. My fear about having my face captured by all these cameras was little more than superstitious dread. It's not like they were capturing my soul.

Now, I knew that my friend had recently marched in one of the massive demonstrations against Bush and Blair's illegal invasion plans for Iraq. "Look," I said, "you marched in the street to stand up and be counted. But even so, how would you have felt if – as a condition of protesting – you were forced to first record your identity in a government record-book?" My friend had signed petitions, he'd marched in the street, but even so, he had to admit that there would be some kind of chilling effect if your identity had to be captured as a condition of participating in public political events.

Trump has divided the country into two groups of people: "citizens" (who are sometimes only semi-citizens) and immigrants (who have no rights):

https://crookedtimber.org/2025/03/29/trumps-war-on-immigrants-is-the-cancellation-of-free-society/#fn-53926-1

Trump has asserted that he can arrest and deport immigrants (and some semi-citizens) for saying things he doesn't like, or even liking social media posts he disapproves of. He's argued that he can condemn people to life in an offshore slave-labor camp if he doesn't like their tattoos. It is tyranny, built on ubiquitous surveillance, fueled by spite and grievance.

One of Trumpism's most important tenets is that private institutions should have the legal right to discriminate against minorities that he doesn't like. For example, he's trying to end the CFPB's enforcement action against Townstone, a mortgage broker that practiced rampant racial discrimination:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-03-28-trump-scrambles-pardon-corporate-criminals-townstone-boeing-cfpb/

By contrast, Trump abhors the idea that private institutions should be allowed to discriminate against the people he likes, hence his holy war against "DEI":

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/29/trump-administration-warns-european-companies-to-comply-with-anti-dei-order.html

This is the crux of Wilhoit's Law, an important and true definition of "conservativism":

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

Wilhoit's definition is an important way of framing how conservatives view the role of the state. But there's another definition I like, one that's more about how we relate to one-another, which I heard from Steven Brust: "Ask, 'What's more important: human rights or property rights?' Anyone who answers 'property rights are human rights' is a conservative."

the new honda odyssey will tear your children limb from limb.

It actually fucks

THE WIGGLES JUST RELEASED A SONG CALLED “WE’RE FRIENDS OF DOROTHY”??????

okayyyyyyy

For context:

Dolly Parton is also on the album doing a collaboration as well :)

the secret lives of real birbs!

You know, I went to make a joke about Fishing Simulator (the video game) but when I went searching for it...

It turns out that when you live in the future, a lot of the scifi gadgets of yesteryear are now real things that you can buy!

they won't even let you ride your bike indoors anymore. because of oak.