"cancel your nyt subscription! stop buying starbucks every day! boycott the switch 2!" can i pls have some of ur money?? pls?????
if your lie is a good enough lie god will make it real
No way out
idiot jail for ignorant beasts
Sisyphus
one must imagine sisyphus ouppy
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……….
the class went well and they asked if i wanted to do another one in a couple weeks and i said yeah, and they’re taking uh… fuck, what’s the word for inventory when it’s people?? attendance?? whatever, they’re trying to see who’s interested to get a feel of if it’d be 1 three hour class again or if there’s too many kids so we’d do a couple classes. anyways, i love the emails from Concerned Parents.
“will there be knives involved?” we are baking cookies.
“what temperatures does the oven get to/will it be hot enough to burn?” we are baking cookies.
“will there be [insert ingredient used in cookies]?” we are baking cookies.
“are you using fahrenheit or celsius?” ??????? d-does it matter?? it’s going to get Hot. (also celsius; this is ontario)
“are the ovens childproof?” no?? i’m assuming you’re asking if i’m going to let your kids reach into the ovens while i’m staring out a window in another room. i will not be allowing your children to use the ovens. they will not be left unattended.
“why is the library baking class taking place at the high school?” the library does not have 10 ovens. the library does not even have 1 oven. the high school has many ovens.
“what if i don’t want my child to have cookies? can you let her make muffins instead?” this is a baking class for cookies. we are baking cookies.
“cookies aren’t healthy. why don’t you make [insert whatever]” do you know how many cookies i can make with a $40 budget and a trip to the bulk store? we are making cookies.
“who needs a class to bake a cookie, why not teach something more valuable?” IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT THE COOKIES, KAREN, IT’S ABOUT FAMILIARIZING CHILDREN WITH THE ART AND SCIENCE OF BAKING/COOKING/FOOD, ABOUT TRYING NEW THINGS, MAKING MISTAKES AND REALIZING THAT THE MISTAKES ARE NOT ONLY OKAY TO MAKE BUT VALUABLE IN AND OF THEMSELVES, FAMILIARIZING THEM WITH INDEPENDENCE, THE UNDERSTANDING OF HOW THINGS CAN COME TOGETHER TO FORM A NEW AND BETTER WHOLE, ALL WHILE HAVING TRYING TO INJECT A MODICUM OF JOY INTO THEIR LITTLE LIVES. SORRY THAT THERE ARE CONCEPTS AT PLAY YOU CAN’T SEEN TO UNDERSTAND HERE. MAYBE YOU SHOULD COME JOIN AND I’LL LET YOU MAKE A FUCKING COOKIE.
You see, this is the reckless, dangerous attitude towards understanding the online far right that I was talking about. 4chan is, in fact, not a ground zero for fascism. Hell, its predecessor, Fuck You and Die subforum of SomethingAwful, is also not the ground zero. For a standalone website, that's stormfront in 1996, though we can track it farther back for disparate chatrooms and forums even before SF. SA, to its credit had no explicit Nazi stuff as a rule, but FYAD, up til its deletion by Richard "lowtax" Kyanka as one of his last acts as SA's admin, started getting bolder and bolder with dogwhistles to the point where not even lowtax could avoid confronting doing something about, in his words, "a loving racist shithole with no redeeming qualities whatsoever."
Ah, we've gotten off-topic. 4chan as the ground zero, right. Anyway, it's, like, literally just not true, and this is very easy to verify. I am starting to think that these people are not too serious about studying the far-right on the internet. If they did, they'd know that 4chan has always been a place for embittered nerd boys (that heavily, heavily skew white) to gather and all sorts of bigotries have always been tolerated, yes, but also that stormfront, a website that we always need to be aware of when we talk about these things, only got serious about recruiting on 4chan after moot sold 4chan to 2chan's former operator, wherein the infamous politics board reopened and allowed for stormfront's posters to infiltrate /pol/, and from there, every other board.
The stormfront recruitment, however, also needs to be put into the context of gamergate, a radicalizing event that happened on /vg/, but quickly moved onto 8chan and reddit, becuase moot, still the owner of 4chan for 1 more year at this point, moderated /vg/ and banned the organization of organized harrassment (one of the two good things that moot ever did, the other being closing /pol/ before hiroyuki opened it again), and this follows the trajectory of what I'll talk about here shortly:
Qanon might have gotten its start on 4chan, but the Q research board was on 8chan, following the more committed and radicalized gamergate nazis. I won't even get into how funny it is to do this gnashing of teeth about Qanon when their best effort was the January 6th. Even if Qanon is as scary as these liberals "leftists" believe, most of its worst, socially reactionary, and yes, violent tenants were developed on 8chan's Q research board. While Nazis from stormfront certainly changed the broader culture of 4chan for the worse, and far and away, a lot of those Nazis stuck around, it until wasn't the iberian wedding of the two after hiroyuki's buyout that we could really say that 4chan resembles what we see today.
Once again, these (mostly)-boys that populated 4chan have always been embittered and expressed this in bigotry, both ironic and unironic, there is no denying that. However, we have to keep our eyes on the cultural historical context here. 4chan, like every other site, goes through changes, both in terms of userbase and management. To deny this and transpose the current iteration onto all iterations in backwards perpetuity or even worse, the idea in your heads as the only version that exists, helps no one but people who want you to be less informed. It is a comforting lie to think that 4chan is a singular bad place, and not a place borne out of specific grievance-based nerd culture of the 2000s that interacted with worse places and had the worst of its demographics spun off into multiple worse places. However, believing in this will surely be worse for understanding how the far-right ideas travel through the internet, which only makes you more susceptible to their dogwhistles.
Like, I also give an outsized assessment of 4chan for spreading orientalist notions of what Japan is like for the English-speaking audience, some of which the supposed "progressive" people repeat without batting an eye, because before stormfront, it was 2chan's far-right nerds that, seeing a western gathering of nerds with a format familiar to them, planted the seed of seeing Japan as a reactionary paradise, frozen in time and unable to make progress, a notion that the nascent users of 4chan took back to somethingawful, then to the rest of the 'net as, for better or worse, people from somethingawful became tastemakers on the english-speaking internet.
Even then, I don't place 4chan as this Saṃjiva hell where violence forever spills out without concern for anywhere else on the internet, like some people tend to see, because I saw the migration firsthand and I read people with even more qualification than me write about these things. If you want to confidently speak on how a website has impacted the culture writ large, like any other entities that exist in cultural context, you have to study its history before making an arugment!
All of this isn't even getting into how outside of the United States (and Japan and South Korea and China; basically anywhere else without a parallel far-right net infrastructure), facebook has been the consistent way for the far-right to organize, including facebook hosting the incitement and organization of multiple far-right calls for genocides across the world, with Ethiopia and Myanmar being two big examples.
Also while all of this is happening, InfoWars has been the real online content radicalizing people over the age of 30 and under the age of, let's say, generously, 70, since 1999, and there's a good chance that they stumbled into infowars from the coast to coast radio. How fast do we all forget the Red Angry Man of Austin, Texas.
this video has been going around for a while but the English subtitles didn't match the energy of the spoken French at all. i had to fix it.
reblog to spread this version
so long as we're back to social justice 101 on this stupid website, u need to be aware of the feedback loop that emerges from disproportionate scrutiny: any social group that is placed under extra scrutiny, regardless of the actual prevalence of any particular behaviour, will appear to engage in that behaviour more often.
you see this most blatantly with racialised groups (more cops in black neighbourhoods = more arrests in black neighbourhoods = "omg look at all the crime in these neighbourhoods!" = more cops in black neighbourhoods etc). even if the rate of crime is the same (putting to one side the criminalisation of poverty which is also an important related factor), one group gets away with it way more often and a new generation of racists is indoctrinated with the crime statistics which "prove" that some groups are simply more criminal in nature. we see a similar phenomenon online with particular groups (trans women being a huge example) being subjected to mass stalking, their every move documented by weirdos and broadcast as representative of the group as a whole.
tl;dr - overscrutinising groups based on existing bigotries creates a recurring feedback loop, reproducing those bigotries across generations and nominally justifying them. this is bad, and you need to remember that you are not immune to it.
the version of minecraft thats uploaded is unfinished copy that looks like this and i believe this might be the best way to watch it
this is so fucking good man i cannot imagine watching this any other way
If Tumblr goes down you won't find me again just know im out there somewhere fingering myself and/or others
“You never reply to messages” I am just one person okay I am understaffed
BABE GET THE CONDOMS THERES A NEW DEFUNCTLAND VIDEO
For context I like to imagine that longform video essays are used in a similar way
have you heard of this spray that makes you see hair on your face that is otherwise invisible so you can shave it with a dull plastic razor that comes in a 20 pack which will be on this planet for hundreds of years??? buy. have you heard of this single use sheet masks that does nothing different than a normal mask and you have to wear it overnight (it will come off) and on flights (you look crazy)??? buy. have you heard of this camera that makes you see your greasy scalp (normal) and dead skin (also normal) up close so you can purchase a treatment for hundreds of dollars and/or exfoliating scrub containing particles that are going down your drain and straight into the sea???? buy. have you heard of this special plastic gadget that
low poly hate pillar
get rotated idiot
I had to make this real.
"cancel your nyt subscription! stop buying starbucks every day! boycott the switch 2!" can i pls have some of ur money?? pls?????
My coworker completely misreads our maintenance guy’s vibes… he sees a big fuzzy bearded dude who works outside and thinks he must be super macho, completely missing all the bisexual tabletop gamer coding in his mannerisms. So when maintenance guy and I greet each other like high camp theatre nerds with a series of bows and flourishes and made-up titles, coworker is SO visibly confused and thinks I must have trained him to do this.
yeah he is my thrall now. I clicker-trained him with football hamburger gun and now he rolls for initiative at my command.
