Laughter and Nerdery

drew over something i wrote for a class and liked :] sorry the cars are lowkey ugly, its because I fucking hate cars and cant be bothered to learn what they look like beyond ominous hunks of metal

edit: transcript of the poem by itself under the cut

tes THDPSSSSPS 💜

:D

Calling word for Greek cats

Don’t forget the word in front! In all, it should be:

TES THDPSSSSPS

Hi new friends. Please don’t censor words, especially triggering ones. Seeing trigger words written l!ke th!s doesn’t stop them from being triggering.

It just stops Tumblr’s built in filter (see under settings) from working which many of us have in place to protect ourselves.

This has happened to me multiple times this week, and as someone currently struggling with suicidal ideation, has not been great.

You are not on TikTok or Insta, please use the full words so people can protect themselves. Thank you 💖

“Huh, weird my activity feed is spiking way too much considering I haven’t posted much lately, let’s see what’s oh... Yeah, that tracks.”

This is from 2022 but it's still vital Tumblr etiquette. Please don't self censor the way TikTok has taught you to. You can say kill, fuck, sex, murder, suicide, rape etc etc

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been exposed to major triggers recently because people are tagging rape as “grape.”

Please don’t do that. Just say the word so those of us with the filters in place can protect ourselves. Thank you 💖

As one whose loans have been forgiven, I want to frame this more accurately. Biden has taken tremendous heat for forgiving loans that ought to have been paid back and dumping the debt on the taxpayer.

What Biden actually did is what the EXECUTIVE branch of government is meant for: he enforced the law. The contracts for those loans and many more included forgiveness under certain criteria: x years of income-based repayment, 10 years of public service, borrower disability, so on. Borrowers met the criteria and were refused the forgiveness guaranteed in the contracts.

People have gone mad over shaming borrowers for supposedly not fulfilling the terms of their loans, when many exceeded their obligations. Meanwhile few have said a peep against the lenders and servicers that refused to honor the terms they too signed off on. The Biden administration intervened to stop their mass evasion of legal obligations.

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??

Let me explain what is happening here, because I don’t think that this post is very representative of why this matters.

The purpose of the theme studies, this one included, is to locate the physical remnants of the past, so that they can be properly preserved by governmental and nonprofit entities. They are not just descriptions of history, they are documents that can be used for grant work, for preventing places from being destroyed, or for promoting the restoration of those places. This theme study is a statement from the federal government that the preservation of these places is important, and that can be translated by the states into these places being legally required to be protected.

The theme studies are also really important because they recontextualized what it means to locate history in a place. This started before the LGBT theme study, there’s a lot of this in the Latino theme study, but they present a reconsideration of what you can call historic when the actions of a group left no physical traces on the spaces that they used. We are now seeing the possibility of considering places like cruising areas as historic properties because they represent the patterns of a culture.

This is the Park Service’s job. This is what you should be expecting from them. There are theme studies and special resource studies on dozens of things. A really important Civil Rights one dropped like last week. The Park Service is charged with running our national parks, sure, but the bulk of their work is like this. This is the type of shit that you can and should expect out of your National Park Service. Nobody else is gonna do it.

Yesssss Parks Service 🙌🏻

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine "Past Tense, Pt. 1"

Reblog if it's the same year as it was yesterday, 2024

this post has a very specific day you CANNOT reblog it on Jan. 1st 2025

It’s still the same year as yesterday, 2024.

More info, from the same OP.

Hello friends, there's a dogwhistle I've seen used a couple times on tumblr that I want to discuss.

Fellow neurodivergents especially, please listen-- towards the end of this post I describe how some in our community have been using it without knowing what it means.

A fairly common antisemitic dogwhistle used amongst alt-right circles on the internet is being a "noticer," "noticing patterns," "pattern noticer," etc. I've seen this from a couple Tumblr blogs I follow reblogging memes and such that use this term but don't provide any context about what sorts of "things" they may be noticing.

Here's the meme that I saw a blog I'm following reblog last night.

Seems pretty harmless, right? It's a meme with a cute cat.

In alt-right circles, what they are referring to "noticing" is the conspiracy theory that Jews control the world/"noticing" evidence of an imagined globalist (read: Jewish) world order/etc. If you see a meme that uses terms like "noticing patterns" that doesn't elaborate what those supposed patterns are-- just leaves you to fill in the blank yourself-- take a look at the types of things OP might be posting. The alt-right has an idea that it's forbidden to talk about who might be behind the "conspiracies" they talk about (again, the target is frequently Jewish people) so lack of context is often a red flag.

I sent the blog who reblogged this an ask informing them that the meme was a dogwhistle. If you see someone reblog something like this, check what they've been posting. If this seems like an isolated incident, the person probably reblogged it not knowing what the term actually meant. That's why dogwhistles are so effective-- to the average person they look harmless if you don't know what to watch out for!

Let's take a look at how alt-righters use this term.

Here's an alt-right definition of it from Urban Dictionary.

Oh boy, this one gets a bigotry bingo for all the dogwhistles used here. If I miss any, feel free to comment. Here are the ones I found:

-Noseticing: Noticing plus nose, based on the stereotype for Jewish people to have large noses.

-"those who cannot be named"/skirting around saying Jew: again the idea that it's forbidden to talk about who they think is behind their conspiracy theories.

-"world events and agendas": idea that Jewish people have a Globalist agenda etc etc

-Degeneracy: Nazi term to describe the behaviors/people they find undesirable.

-Early life: refers to the section in a person's Wikipedia page. If a person was brought up Jewish, it'll usually say so there.

-Oy vey: a Jewish exclamation of exasperation that Nazis have unfortunately co-opted when talking about Jewish people.

Here's probably the most obviously antisemitic meme I found.

The title and first bullet point include the "noticer" term. This meme also talks about a "group" who controls wealth. Who might the poster be referring to here?

Here's a Twitter account with many similar alt-right terms. Explicitly identifies as a Nazi and ethno-nationalist, etc etc.

A couple other pages. I clicked on them to see if I could find any more examples but the first seemed pretty blank and the second... Well, I don't have a twitter so I couldn't view.

Let's unpack these a little. The first one has "13 outta 52," a statistic used among white supremacists to depict Black people (especially African-Americans) as "savage": 13 referring to the percentage of America that is Black and 52 referring to the alleged percentage of murders in the U.S. that are committed by Black people. "109 countries" refers to the idea that Jewish people have been expelled from 109 countries during history. (Which isn't entirely true. Some "countries" in this count are actually cities, regions, etc.) Some white supremacists may use the number 110 instead to suggest that it should happen again.

The second one has a blurb alleging a global sterilization effort and concerns of fertility. This is likely in connection to pro-natalism for white people. If Nazis want a so-called "Aryan nation," they're going to want white people to populate it, and so they encourage white people to have babies for their cause. Nazi Germany employed this tactic as well, even awarding "Aryan" German women who had four or more children for their contributions to the Nazi cause.

The reason why I'm emphasizing that context matters is that some neurodivergent people have seen this and co-opted it into neurodivergent circles. As a person who is Jewish and autistic, this is pretty alarming to me. I'll show a couple examples from Tumblr:

And

I've left out the URLs of the OPs because I want to give the benefit of the doubt-- they both explicitly refer to being a "pattern noticer" in terms of neurodivergence. And it's easy to see why introducing this term to ND folks would be an easy way to get a dogwhistle passed off as harmless! Since autistic people often have analytical minds, we often make connections that others might not be able to see. But unfortunately, using terms like this only makes it much easier for antisemites to fly under the radar.

Stay safe and let's keep Tumblr free of this shit.

TLDR: Dog Whistles that use Nervo-diversity to hide antisemitism. "A Pattern Noticer"

this is my drawing of xena beating the fuck out of elon musk

My fellow Americans, act accordingly.

Okay so this is taken from the Three Card Blind discord server from an acquaintance of mine, Quag.

It’s Alice’s turn and she controls Zimone and has a Fling, an Awaken the Woods, and a fragmentize in hand. She controls 2 Forests (green mana), a Plains (white mana), a mountain (red mana), as well as two lands that are here because they can be sacrificed.

Both Alice and Bob have infinite mana colorless mana made via an artifact that can untap itself for more mana.

Bob has 10 life and controls a Wasteland and two Forests. He has a Nourishing Shoal in hand. He also controls a Battle of Wits and has 250 cards in his library.

To win before Bob does next turn, Alice needs to create a large creature token with Zimone by casting Awaken the Woods, and at end step Fling the token. However, Bob with his infinite mana can cast an arbitrarily large Nourishing Shoal, gaining 10^100 life for example. Alice will try to Fragmentize the Monolith that Bob controls. In response he will generate the mana to cast the giant Shoal and he has to pick a number.

Then, Alice can cast Awaken the Woods to make her land count a prime number that is bigger than 10^100 so that at end of turn, she can Fling the Primo token at Bob’s face. However, once the trigger goes on the stack to make the token, Bob can Wasteland any of Alice’s non basic lands to make her total land count a composite number, making no token.

But, Alice has a trick! She can sacrifice one of her own Havenwood Battle grounds to make her number of lands 2 less in combination with a wasteland. This would allow her to still have a prime number if she chose the larger of a pair of twin primes as her target land count.

The question is this: Can Alice always make a number of lands bigger than any other number so that if Bob destroys one of her lands, she can sacrifice another, remaining at a prime number, and making the token to Fling for the win?

(So: are there infinite twin primes?)

The game state, courtesy of Quag also.

@pomrania replied:

In plain English:

The question is, then: is it guaranteed that Alice can always pick a prime number that's larger than Bob's number and is still prime after having two subtracted from it, no matter what number Bob picks?

Answering that question requires proving the twin prime conjecture, one of the great unsolved problems of mathematics.

If you vote in North Carolina, you're going to see this on your ballot. Looks pretty straightforward, right?

But it's a trap placed by the GOP. ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Voting "For" this referendum will remove the phrase "and every person who has been naturalized" from this section on voter eligibility in the NC constitution. This could place the future voting rights of about 400,000 naturalized US citizens in the state in jeopardy.

Just a reminder - it's already illegal for non-citizens to vote! There's no evidence that this happens in significant numbers anywhere in the country, and North Carolina has restrictions in place against it happening at all, like the voter ID law that's now in effect.

(The voter ID law disproportionately affects POC, as well as transgender voters, both of whom are more likely to vote Democratic as well as lack the needed ID, but that's another post.)

Voting "Against" on this measure will leave the state constitution unchanged.

Here's the whole bill (PDF): https://dashboard.ncleg.gov/api/Services/BillSummary/2023/H1074-SMBK-89(sl)-v-2

Name your cats after mathematicians.

We did!

His name is Gauss.

his name is gauss!

His name is Galois!

Basically republicans want to make it so your ID has to match your birth certificate which affects everyone from trans people to married women to immigrants.

Meanwhile, in GA, they're going to force all ballots to be hand counted, which could make it difficult to meet the deadline to certify the vote, and thus potentially allow them to give the state to Trump regardless of the outcome.

In many states, such as Ohio, Florida, Texas and North Carolina, they've been purging voters from the rolls by the millions.

If voting didn't matter, why are they trying so damn hard to stop us?

Name your cats after mathematicians.

We did!

His name is Gauss.

his name is gauss!

His name is Galois!

The black & white one is Emmy (Noether) and the grey one is Ada (Lovelace). They are my mathemakittens.

Repaired my fave jacket, got emotional, drew something about it