"Please scream inside your heart.”

#the tragic man in question (requested by @livinginsunnyhell )

can i speak my truth. i miss eddie..

#if we had a functional SEC they'd all be in jail for market manipulation and insider trading

(insp.)

More Democrats need to be like Sen Brian Schatz [D-HI]. Stand up. Have courage.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal [D-CT] steps up.

Every person has a right to due process.

It does not say citizen. It says person. Immigration status does not change your right to due process.

Republicans are fascists.

I once wrote a 1500 word essay on something I'd forgotten to read in the 40 minutes before class. Including the time it took to read the thing I'd forgotten to read.

I got an A on that paper.

Writing is a skill. Skill is muscle. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies. If you are a student and you are tempted to use genAI to cheese an assignment, I am begging you for your own sake to not do it.

This is not a moral stance about genAI (which is shit at what it's ostensibly for, and full of lies and evil, and fueled by art theft and burning rainforests, and there is no good reason to ever use it for anything; that's the moral reason for why you shouldn't use it), it is a purely pragmatic stance based on the fact that if you use it you will never learn the single most essential skill that is used in every single workplace.

You will never learn to bullshit.

And if you cannot bullshit, you will not understand when you are being fed bullshit by others.

For your own sake you must learn to do your own thinking, your own bullshitting, because our trashfire society runs on bullshit and for your own good you must become fluent in it, because very few people will bother to translate it for you. It was asinine in the late 90s, and it is asinine today, but it is the central truth of adult society: everything is bullshit, and you need to know what is going on beneath the bullshit, and you need to be able to bullshit back if necessary.

I know that the expectations being placed on you are ever-increasing, and I know that it does not seem rational to put effort into explaining the plot of a Charles Dickens novel to someone who has read the thing 50 times and will read 50 identical essays about it over the weekend. I know you are being handed ever-greater heaps of what is functionally mindless busywork because of an institutional obsession with metrics that don't actually measure learning in a useful way. High school was nightmarish in the 90s and I am fully aware that it has only gotten worse.

Nevertheless, you must try, if only for your own sake. Curiosity is your best hope, and dogged determination your best weapon. Learn, please, if only out of spite.

I was able to get an A on that paper because I was able to skim the reading, figure out what it was about, and bullshit for 1500 words in the space of 40 minutes.

Imagine what you can do if you learn to bullshit like I can bullshit.

For my senior year of AP English, I was assigned reading over Easter break. We were instructed to read The Old Man And The Sea, and save the rest of the short stories in the book for the first week back.

Unfortunately, what I heard was "read everything BUT The Old Man And The Sea."

Double unfortunately: the first day back was a test, on The Old Man And The Sea. Which I had read exactly zero words of. It was, notably, a short essay test. It wasn't multiple choice or fill in the blank. It was designed to require deliberate answers from scratch, entirely out of your own head, with nothing to go on BUT what was in your head.

And in the course of about 45 minutes, I was able to use the questions of the test itself to piece together a vague enough sense of how the story went to bullshit my way through other questions. I gave wide, thematic answers that were extremely light on details, since I did not know any of them, and did not even know this test would be happening until it was in front of me. An essay test for an AP-level English class.

I had a starting point of zero information, and an essay test about the thing I was supposed to have read.

I bullshitted my way to a B+ on it.

On a test I should have gotten a ZERO on.

It's been 16 years since I took that test.

I couldn't tell you a damn thing about The Old Man And The Sea.

But you better fucking believe I still know how to bullshit, and when someone is trying to bullshit me.

The power and utility of knowing how bullshit works CANNOT be overstated. It is one of the most important skills you can ever have.

This is also a good string on this topic.

I know I had a class in college for which I was supposed to read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

I also know that I got two chapters in and no major female characters appeared, so I became hopelessly bored and gave up for other, recreational books (with women in)

what I do not remember is how I passed that class. but I did! so...bullshit so well you have no memory of exactly HOW you bullshitted?

SCREAM 4 (2011) dir. Wes Craven

9-1-1

S08E13 : Invisible | dir. Brenna Malloy

another reason why im such a buck confesses first warrior is because eddie always expresses his love for buck through words (you act like you’re expandable but you’re wrong. there’s no one in this world i trust with my son more than you. i hope you know you do matter to me.) and buck always expresses his love for eddie through actions (subletting his house. introducing him to carla. fixing the wall. being there for him, always.) and i think the love confession switching this around by having eddie show his love through an action (choosing to go back to la, to buck) and buck show his love through words (love confession) is just. so satisfying. imo

COOL GUY ALERT

ao3 is an awesome website for people who love "open in new tab"

Just in time for Valentine’s Day... 💔 

Ready to break up with Google?

So are we!

We’ve rounded up a bunch of privacy-centric alternatives for everything Google.

Check out the full list over on the blog!

- The Ellipsus Team xo

Fun fact, on top of being staunchly against genAI, ellipsus literally has an Export To AO3 button. I do the majority of my writing in LibreOffice, but I've been moving all my GDocs over to ellipsus for a bit and I really love the interface. If you're looking for an alternative to GDocs, this is The One.

So apparently last year the National Park Service in the US dropped an over 1200 page study of LGBTQ American History as part of their Who We Are program which includes studies on African-American history, Latino history, and Indigenous history. 

Like. This is awesome. But also it feels very surreal that maybe one of the most comprehensive examinations of LGBTQ history in America (it covers sports! art! race! historical sites! health! cities!) was just casually done by the parks service. 

This is really great??

(Source)

The case was heard ahead-of-schedule on the Supreme Court's "emergency docket". All Democratic justices (and one Republican) dissented, one saying that it was "beyond puzzling" to consider this case an "emergency".

This post is my attempt to track what’s going on with US politics. This post is constantly being updated so if you see this on your dash, check my blog (this post will be pinned) to see the latest version. If there’s anything I miss that you think should be included on this list, please let me know.

January 2025

February 2025

March 2025

April 2025

National Politics:

State Politics:

Other News:

I had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to say because, honestly, I’m exhausted. And I’m sure you’re exhausted too. We need to remember that this is a marathon, not a sprint. So, don’t disengage or check out, but do make sure you’re taking care of yourself. Also, if you’re going to protest, please keep your protests peaceful. Resorting to violence makes you as bad as them.

And remember: we are stronger together. They want us to feel isolated, but we’re not. Diversity is strength. Community is strength. No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.