The limit does not exist

If the story and writing are good then it doesn't matter how long it is.

Or water fountains, public washrooms, outdoors tables, etc, etc

Notice how removing seating doesnt actually prevent people from sitting it just makes them uncomfortable and makes public spaces more hostile it doesnt actually work at controlling their behavior not till a pig comes along anyways and they'll harass a homeless person/teen whatever they're sitting on.

Btw keep in mind how this also more dramatically affects disabled people, not everyone can stand for hours at a time or feasibly sit on the floor

(This post is brought to you by the fact that tumblr are, hilariously, claiming that 50% of current users are gen z, and i wanna see how accurate claim that is.)

hOLY FUCKING SHIT I CANT

So THAT’S what a sloth sounds like

what all babies sound like when mildly inconvenienced

I know a lot of adults that also sound like that when mildly inconvenienced

Bernie Sanders | It has now been 30 days with NO humanitarian aid getting into Gaza.

No food, no water, no medicine, no fuel.

That is barbaric. The U.S. must end our complicity in these atrocities.

It's your retirement insurance, and you paid every premium. Anyone who paid their premiums for forty quarters [10 years] has Social Security. Social Security has never missed a payment in over 85 years.

Social Security was established by FDR during The Great Depression because the elderly were destitute. It's prevention.

Billionaires attacking Social Security are evil.

Billionaires who under-contribute are evil.

HEY, FELLOW HATERS OF INSANELY-BRIGHT CAR HEADLIGHTS, SOMEONE HAS STARTED A PETITION TO REGULATE THEM.

It's an official petition through the Australian Government's e-petition page, which means if it gets enough signatures, it will be tabled in government.

You do have to be an Australian citizen to sign it, BUT!!! PLEASE REBLOG THIS EVEN IF YOURE NOT, because these kind of things have a roll-on effect, and if Australia legislates LED headlights, then other countries may follow.

FYI, the petition asks only for your name and email, and once you've clicked the sign button, they'll send you an email to confirm your signature --- you need to click the confirmation link in the email to have your signature counted.

Why do all the beautiful, colorful vintage bathrooms end up in the wrong hands. Come here. I would treasure you

More arches please

Imagine seeing this and wanting to rip it out and replace it with gray luxury vinyl plank

CATALYST JOURNAL

If US journalism is going to survive, the advertising-based economic model has to be replaced by a robust and democratic public financing. In this interview, leading media scholar and activist Robert W. McChesney outlines a proposal to revitalize journalism along just these lines.

Interview by Editors

Editors: Just to set the stage, what is the state of the news media in the United States today?

Robert McChesney: It is basically in free fall, and probably about a foot above ground, falling at one hundred miles an hour. It’s in complete disarray and decline. This is not a controversial point. This is not something that is debated. Everyone sees this. The data is overwhelming.

The way people measure journalism, especially local journalism, is through funding and revenues for daily newspapers. Even today, daily newspapers provide most of the original news reporting in any community. This data includes digital journalism, which is the direction all journalism is heading, if it is not there already.

Until around the middle of the twentieth century, daily newspapers accounted for 1 percent of GDP in the United States. It was a massive industry, among the most prominent in the country, with a footprint in every nook and cranny of the nation. It started a slow decline in the mid-twentieth century, with total collapse over the past two decades, so that daily-newspaper revenues now account for less than one-tenth of 1 percent of GDP, and they continue to fall at a precipitous rate.

Why is that? Since social media came along around 2005, the whole business model that twentieth-century journalism is predicated upon collapsed, because it is based on 80 percent of the revenue coming from advertising. No one makes money on a daily newspaper from just subscriptions or selling copies. Circulation could never suffice. Advertising revenues are what kept papers alive — they were a kind of subsidy on top of the sales or subscription revenues.

When social media and broadband internet came along, it didn’t take very long for advertisers to realize they no longer had to subsidize journalism to reach their target audiences. They could go to Google or AOL or Yahoo or Facebook and say, “This is the target audience we want for our product, find them for us.” And those companies all had the micro-level information to say to the advertisers, “Yeah, we can send your message directly to your target audience on whatever website they’re on. We’ll get on it, so you don’t have to subsidize journalism anymore, and we can dramatically lower your costs and increase your effectiveness.”

And so advertisers abandoned daily newspapers; they no longer support them. As a result, newspapers’ incomes have fallen, and a significant percentage of them are now out of business. Just since 2008, the number of journalists in the country has been cut in half. And that was after two decades of previous downsizing. Most of what remains will be gone in short order. There’s just a handful of successful daily newspapers remaining, and they’re successful with a small s, not a capital <S — the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal.

While I emphasize local news media, national news media is far from satisfactory. Ironically, we now have a national news media that’s pretty much like what the Soviet Union had in its glory days. There are maybe two or three decently staffed newsrooms covering the entire country. Fifty years ago, there were probably as many as fifty different newsrooms in Washington, DC, many representing local newspapers that had Washington bureaus, like the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Los Angeles Times. Many of those bureaus are closed now.

Editors: You’ve said that the public relations industry increasingly accounts for more and more news content.

Robert McChesney: That has been the case. It was actually built into journalism throughout the twentieth century, because public relations people realized that professional journalism had codes for newsgathering — reliance on official sources, and news events in particular — that PR firms could exploit for their clients. Newspaper owners liked PR because the material it provided allowed them to reduce their editorial budgets. Journalists were less enthralled by it.

PR-infused journalism has expanded in the last few decades with media corporations and conglomerates so eager for profits. They found that they could use more of these public relations materials as the basis of stories, that it would cut their editorial costs, and that readers might not notice much of a difference.

PR has always been there. Today, however, with media owners desperate to survive and far fewer working journalists on board, PR has more power than ever to shape the news as it pleases.

Something else happened with the emergence of super-profitable monopoly daily newspapers over the course of the twentieth century. News media institutions became fully commercial, owned by investors who cared only about profit maximization. In our constitutional system, however, news media were regarded as necessary political institutions, the veritable fourth branch of government that informed and empowered citizens so they could effectively engage in self-governance. In the nineteenth century, every great social movement — from abolitionism and women’s suffrage to agrarian populism and labor rights — was built around newspapers. Much of the work around rejuvenating local journalism is built on the idea that local news media will return to their roots and draw people into a public life that is in the process of disintegrating. When we recreate local news media, we are building the necessary institutions for effective democratic politics.

Editors: You refer to “news deserts” in your writing. What does this term mean?

Robert McChesney: “News desert” refers to something that has never existed before in American history. The term describes an area — a county, a town, or even a region — that has no paid journalists in a newsroom covering it, so nothing gets reported (or, if you want to loosen the definition a bit, if you just have one newsroom or so few journalists that it’s impossible for them to cover more than the local high school football game or take whatever the mayor says and transcribe it and call that news).

News deserts now account for the vast majority of this country. If you looked at a map, you would conclude that the whole country was pretty much a news desert. There are communities now, like Salinas, California, where there is not a single journalist. If you’re a politician there, you can do whatever the hell you want; no one’s going to have any idea.

(Continue Reading)

HAPPY 50TH BIRTHDAY PEDRO PASCAL! 2nd of April 1975

“You are my sun, my moon, my star lit sky. Without you, I dwell in darkness.”

- Madmartigan, Willow (1988)

A co-worker of mine was standing outside with me during a break from customers to share a cigarette with me, and told me about how he had lost his brother that he was close with some years ago. He told me about how they used to be in a band together with some friends, and how ever since he'd died, he hadn't played any music because he'd been too scared and anxious. I told him about how I'd lost my brother to suicide some years ago.

I went home and pulled out an old tiny wooden box my brother had given me before he'd died. I'd been using it to store guitar picks I'd collected over the years, including one guitar pick that used to be his. I haven't played the guitar since he'd died, my hands are too small to play some of the chords, so I play bass and piano instead.

I went to work the next day and gifted my brothers old guitar pick to my co-worker. I told him that it'd been sitting in a box for ten years unused, and would probably sit there for longer if I kept it there. Told him that I thought he deserved to have it, because I bet he could put it to better use than I ever would. Told him I didn't feel like it was coincidence that me and him would cross paths with each other in our lives, and that it seemed suiting that we had these similar experiences but split in two halves. That somehow, I felt like he was meant to have the guitar pick. I told him that I knew he'd not played guitar since his brother died, but that if he ever decided to play again one of these days, maybe he'd be able to honor both of our brothers by using that guitar pick.

He almost cried. He thanked me. Then he went home that night and for the first time in years he played the guitar.

I don't know what the meaning of life is or what my purpose is, but I do believe that love and human connection is one of the most important things in life. It's finding ways to tell strangers you love them and share experiences with others. I think it's all just about love.

“Some years ago, I was stuck on a crosstown bus in New York City during rush hour. Traffic was barely moving. The bus was filled with cold, tired people who were deeply irritated—with one another; with the rainy, sleety weather; with the world itself. Two men barked at each other about a shove that might or might not have been intentional. A pregnant woman got on, and nobody offered her a seat. Rage was in the air; no mercy would be found here.

But as the bus approached Seventh Avenue, the driver got on the intercom. “Folks,” he said, “I know you’ve had a rough day and you’re frustrated. I can’t do anything about the weather or traffic, but here’s what I can do. As each one of you gets off the bus, I will reach out my hand to you. As you walk by, drop your troubles into the palm of my hand, okay? Don’t take your problems home to your families tonight—just leave ‘em with me. My route goes right by the Hudson River, and when I drive by there later, I’ll open the window and throw your troubles in the water. Sound good?”

It was as if a spell had lifted. Everyone burst out laughing. Faces gleamed with surprised delight. People who’d been pretending for the past hour not to notice each other’s existence were suddenly grinning at each other like, is this guy serious?

Oh, he was serious.

At the next stop—just as promised—the driver reached out his hand, palm up, and waited. One by one, all the exiting commuters placed their hand just above his and mimed the gesture of dropping something into his palm. Some people laughed as they did this, some teared up—but everyone did it. The driver repeated the same lovely ritual at the next stop, too. And the next. All the way to the river.

We live in a hard world, my friends. Sometimes it’s extra difficult to be a human being. Sometimes you have a bad day. Sometimes you have a bad day that lasts for several years. You struggle and fail. You lose jobs, money, friends, faith, and love. You witness horrible events unfolding in the news, and you become fearful and withdrawn. There are times when everything seems cloaked in darkness. You long for the light but don’t know where to find it.

But what if you are the light? What if you’re the very agent of illumination that a dark situation begs for?

That’s what this bus driver taught me—that anyone can be the light, at any moment. This guy wasn’t some big power player. He wasn’t a spiritual leader. He wasn’t some media-savvy “influencer.” He was a bus driver—one of society’s most invisible workers. But he possessed real power, and he used it beautifully for our benefit.

When life feels especially grim, or when I feel particularly powerless in the face of the world’s troubles, I think of this man and ask myself, What can I do, right now, to be the light? Of course, I can’t personally end all wars, or solve global warming, or transform vexing people into entirely different creatures. I definitely can’t control traffic. But I do have some influence on everyone I brush up against, even if we never speak or learn each other’s name. How we behave matters because within human society everything is contagious—sadness and anger, yes, but also patience and generosity. Which means we all have more influence than we realize.

No matter who you are, or where you are, or how mundane or tough your situation may seem, I believe you can illuminate your world. In fact, I believe this is the only way the world will ever be illuminated—one bright act of grace at a time, all the way to the river.“

–Elizabeth Gilbert

I think it’s time this got another airing.