Good luck and Godspeed and break a leg

The Choctaw-Irish Brotherhood(via)

I love stuff like this. Didn’t a tribe in Africa send America some cows after 9/11? Like this is holy and the most valuable thing we have. We hear your suffering and want to do anything in our power to help

It was not a potato famine. The famine didn’t happen because of the potato yeald failing. Ireland was actually producing more than enough food. However it was almost all land owned by Brittish landowners, who took all of the food out of the country to sell in UK. Potato was what the Irish farmers ate, because it was cheep and could be produced in worst parts of the land, where more profitable food couldn’t be grown. When there were no longer potatos, the decision for the farmers was to either starve and sent the food as rent to the landlords or loose their homes and then starve.

The Brittish goverment was unwilling to do anything for two reasons. First was the laissez-faire capitalistic ideology, that put the rights of property owners to make profits above human lives. Rent freeze was unthinkable and they even were unwilling to do proper relief efforts as free food would lower the cost of food. The second reason was distain for the Irish, and the thought that they were “breeding too much” and the famine was a natural way to trim down the population, aka genocidal reasoning.

This is why it’s important to stress it was not a potato famine. The potato blinght was all over Europe but only in Ireland there was a famine. The reasons behind it had nothing to do with potatos and everything to do with the Brittish.

Apparently what made Choctaw want to offer relief to Irish was the news about the Doolough Tragedy. Hundreds of starving people were gathered for inspection to verify they were entitled to recieve relief. The officials would for *some reason* not do that and instead left to a hunting lodge 19 kilometers away to spend the night and said to the starvqing people they would have to walk there by morning to be inspected. The weather conditions were terrible and many of them died completely needlessly during the walk thoroung day and night.

This apparently reminded the Choctaw of their own very recent (and much more explicit and bigger scale) experiences of ethnic clensing, where they were forcibly relocated. It was basically a death march and thousands of Choctaw died from the terrible conditions also completely needlessly.

In 2015 a memorial named Kindred Spirits was installed in Southern Ireland to commemorate the Chactow donation.

Then in 2020:

Choctaw Nation has now added a monument of their own:

I understand that museums have to be dark because light can destroy fragile artifacts. That said, I’m always afraid to walk around the blind corners because what if there is a skeleton

Okay yes sometimes there’s a skeleton, I understand how museums work. But I mean what if it gets me

Fact: you can absolutely kick a skeleton's ass. You are a skeleton wearing biological power armor. Skeletons of adult humans typically weigh less than 30 pounds. You are in a superior weight class by orders of magnitude.

i wish someone had told me that when i was a kid and terrified of having to fight a skeleton

Rose-faced Parrot (Pyrilia pulchra), EAT A TASTY SEED!!!, family Psittacidae, order Psittaciformes, Reserva Mashpi-Amagusa, Ecuador

photograph by Edy Goodyear 

I walk this lonely road. in my bag, i have a giant toad

Don’t know where it goes, but it’s only me and this giant toad

I'm sorry I'm going fucking insane over trans people in sports issues the anti trans crowd has lost the fucking plot and then has the audacity to act like its the trannies who are ridiculous

I used to be of the "well the sports issue isn't really important to me its w/e I just don't want it to be a gateway into other transphobia" but oh my fucking god we are so far gone. The fencing shit is sending me over the edge. What the fuck.

I can't even articulate my words so I'm just going to tell a story in screenshots

I am so fucking tired of being gaslit about this

I'm also still so fucking pissed that we have to include "ooo the trans fencer only finished in X place" because its a reminder that trans women will never be allowed to excel at anything in the public eye without being cut down. Fuck OFF

I think every computer user needs to read this because holy fucking shit this is fucking horrible.

So Windows has a new feature incoming called Recall where your computer will first, monitor everything you do with screenshots every couple of seconds and "process that" with an AI.

Hey, errrr, fuck no? This isn't merely because AI is really energy intensive to the point that it causes environmental damage. This is because it's basically surveilling what you are doing on your fucking desktop.

This AI is not going to be on your desktop, like all AI, it's going to be done on another server, "in the cloud" to be precise, so all those data and screenshot? They're going to go off to Microsoft. Microsoft are going to be monitoring what you do on your own computer.

Now of course Microsoft are going to be all "oooh, it's okay, we'll keep your data safe". They won't. Let me just remind you that evidence given over from Facebook has been used to prosecute a mother and daughter for an "illegal abortion", Microsoft will likely do the same.

And before someone goes "durrr, nuthin' to fear, nuthin to hide", let me remind you that you can be doing completely legal and righteous acts and still have the police on your arse. Are you an activist? Don't even need to be a hackivist, you can just be very vocal about something concerning and have the fucking police on your arse. They did this with environmental protesters in the UK. The culture war against transgender people looks likely to be heading in a direction wherein people looking for information on transgender people or help transitioning will be tracked down too. You have plenty to hide from the government, including your opinions and ideas.

Again, look into backing up your shit and switching to Linux Mint or Ubuntu to get away from Microsoft doing this shit.

there are multiple options here depending on how comfortable you are digging into your computer's registry. You can either simply disable it surface level through settings or excise it entirely from the system registry

reblogging again as a cautionary tale to please PLEASE fucking make a system restore point before you do anything. i consider myself tech savvy and still nearly bricked my computer. and make sure you know how to access safe mode

If you think you might want to try Linux, but you want to make sure that everything you need will work, try setting up a dual boot. You can set up each program in Linux and then uninstall its counterpart from Windows until everything is moved over, and then delete and reallocate the partition(s) that Windows uses.

Note that dual booting can be harder to set up on laptops, since a lot of the hardware manufacturers are in bed with Microsoft and have "optimized" boot procedures that prioritize Windows and fight against mixed installations. Still doable, but you definitely want to make backups first.

Regarding Linux flavours, I promoted Ubuntu to newbies for a long time due to its ease of use and vast online support forums... but recent releases have had increasing problems with hardware, particularly graphics cards, so I can't recommend it any more. Luckily Linux Mint is what Ubuntu used to be, so the majority of online Ubuntu support is applicable to Mint, and it runs like a dream. Give it a try, and if you like it, kick a few bucks to the maintainers.

The linked article is about Copilot, if youve stripped copilot from your computer, it's only storing things localling, not on the cloud. This whole post is turning into misinformation.

You can't "strip" Copilot from Windows; the best you can do is disable it in settings or via the registry, while it remains installed on your computer. As for stripping Recall, Windows says "you can remove Recall by using Turn Windows features on or off in Windows", which sounds like another case of disabling the program rather than truly removing it. Whether disabling a feature is enough for your purposes is up to you.

I will note that early rollouts of Recall in 2024 were criticized because -- even when stored locally -- the captured information was easily accessible to other applications and/or malware, and there have been concerns raised by the UK's data watchdog. On top of that, Recall isn't much more useful than existing system search features, and has been displaying broken performance as recently as last November.

Recall is installed by default on all Windows 11 computers that support the 24H2 update. Microsoft has already placed arguably unnecessary CPU requirements on systems in order to upgrade to 11, while support for 10 is set to end this October, which is going to leave thousands of users stuck between choosing to buy a new machine (which is more likely to have Copilot+/24H2) or taking a major security hit.

Microsoft has already shown their willingness to quietly implement features with serious privacy concerns and no ability to opt-out in that recent mess where Copilot training was added to all Microsoft 365 programs. You can opt-out now, but that feature was only added after several tech news outlets brought it to general attention and people started protesting. There's nothing really stopping Microsoft from changing Recall's behaviour in the future (e.g. making it cloud-only) other than market demand.

Registry changes can irrevocably fuck up your OS install, so as the above poster said, make registry-level changes with caution. But given the current Microsoft ecosystem, I don't think it's unreasonable to be promoting open source alternatives like Linux.

wait WHAT

Wait, so… does -copter come *from* helicopter? 

Yep! This is called rebracketing. Another famous example would be “-burger”: the original food item is named after the German city, [Hamburg]+[er], but got semantically reinterpreted as [ham]+[burger]. Now it’s used as a suffix indicating a type of sandwich.

The popular American Psycho (2000) take I heavily disagree with is that Patrick was convincing.

I heard this consistently; Patrick successfully hid his monstrous nature. He is the wolf in wool at the office. He gets away with what he does because he has successfully infiltrated the palace of normiehood. Patrick Bateman is Good at Being Normal.

This is demonstrably and meaningfully untrue? He's not persuasive. He doesn't convince anyone that he's one of them. He regularly fails his charisma checks. His peers openly dislike and disregard him. They don't notice that he (may or may not be) a sicko who kills sex workers, poor minorities, the homeless, and eventually one of their own both because they don't care/respect him enough to bother and because they're all too self-absorbed to notice the dead woman he's stuffing into the trunk.

This is not a small thing! He isn't keenly using pre conceived biases and superficiality to dodge consequences - they simply don't give a shit about him. Like, that seemed a core tenant of the movie, that his wealthy, brand-obsessed colleagues who talk so much while saying nothing of weight aren't actually listening to his flimsy excuses or explicit murder confessions, as if none of his actions mattered. I seriously hate to be that guy but "it's not that his mask was believable, it's that very few bothered looking at the mask" feels like an important point to not miss.

I can somewhat grasp the pov that Patrick was just too good at presenting as a dorky loser since that's what his peers believe him to be - maybe we're working off different definitions of what a "convincing person" is - But Patrick was absolutely not trying to convince them of this! He desperately tries (and fails!) to kill this image - which doesn't sound like convincing guy activities to me!

The word "convincing" denotes a level of agency I didn't see. It's as if people saw his character as frightening because oh what if the normal guy you talk to everyday at work was secretly a serial killer, despite the vast majority of people he interacts with either think he's an annoying loser or quickly recognize there's something wrong with him but lack the social status to do anything about it. Who did he convince?

When I worked at a grocery store I told people that I couldn’t change the money like that bc of scammers.”Company policy.” But really it’s just bc I can’t math money.

A friend has once again brought it to my attention that it is unusual to have an intact chronological memory of life prior to age 12 and you know what’s weird to ME is that the rest of yall forgot how to sing the clean-up song

Other shit:

Yes I’ve talked about this before and yes I’m going to talk about it again because every single person on earth should be fully and viscerally aware that being a kid feels like every description I’ve ever read of recovering from a stroke and we all grow up and forget and talk about childhood like it was magic.

Yeah some of it was fun and all but don’t you remember FALLING DOWN CONSTANTLY? You don’t remember needing help putting a shirt on cause you got your arm stuck and couldn’t get out and panicked so bad you started crying? You DON’T remember being just CONSTANTLY STICKY? Ohhh my good, pissing yourself. Pissing yourself was the worst. Christ alive, and being put in the playpen with a weird kid

Why were you falling into the toilet?

I WAS LIKE TWO FEET TALL

what's weird about my brain is that i have extremely bad *voluntary* recall but if someone else can prompt me, it turns out that more often than not, the memories are still on file

i would like to also add:

-being a nervous kid means living in silent hill permanently forever. there are monsters. they WILL get you. you can't predict when. no one thinks this is noteworthy.

-some foods make you sick. somehow this doesn't mean you can just not eat them. being sick is really inconsiderate of you, too.

-sticky crumbs are the worst.

-kids cooler than you hate you. kids weirder than you are even more unpredictably violent.

-no one understands your creative vision. 'house' would be so much better with a dragon. why does this require extensive debate.

-the assholes who never put the play dough caps back on the tubs should get their hands unscrewed.

-that one girl who can't tell a story but cries if you interrupt whatever boring thing she was failing to say

-boys are allowed to kill any creature they want in front of you specifically to hurt your feelings and you're the bad guy when you bite them???

-rose petals should taste good but don't. WHY.

-that one church lady who thinks screaming in a shrill and pathetic way at the rude boys is going to work THIS time. what the fuck is wrong with her

-snail slime washes off but slug slime is forever. i still don't understand this one.

-if there are millions of grownups in the world why can't they replace the one currently fucking up being in charge of you and the six boys who like to to torture you. like there's lots more teachers. can't you get one who is trained in not letting kids get tortured? no one in the room has been sneaky about the torture thing. come on.

-clay soil should taste good. look at it. deeply unfair that it doesn't.

-you will never regret putting a small smooth rock in your mouth.

-you chewed too much string and are having an unprecedented bathroom situation.

-why does your friend's mom smell so bad? bad-smelling moms seems like it should be against the rules.

-why does your other friend's mom smell so good? can you get your mom to smell like this?

-extremely specific pretend game scenarios you revisit over and over until your friends are exasperated and ten years later you go OH SHIT as you understand some very embarrassing things about yourself.

-rolling down a grassy hill was such a fantastic combination of chaos and freedom and safety. it's still fun as a grownup but my joints don't agree.

-the utter devastation of squishing a bug you were trying to save. you go from disney princess to warcrimes mcbloodhands in one irreversible second.

-sometimes the free lollipop is just kinda mid. and they don't give you another one to make up for it. and you can't even get THAT mad because mid is still better than nothing.

-mom tells you to clean your toys up but you only have one basket for your stuffed animals, who are currently having a civil war. not good.

-being small enough to climb into a box full of packing peanuts. incredibly good noise. incredibly good texture.

-do you also remember unspooling a tape measure allll the way out, confirming to everyone that the metal end bit COULD rip your eye out, then dropping the tape measure and running out of range before the tape respooled?

-pissing your pants sucks so bad. it stings. and it seems to take so much longer to dry than a water spill does

-you're still a person, every year of your life. everyone says you'll be different when you grow up. and every grownup is so strange, so distant, so unsympathetic and illogical and dismissive and alien. you wonder what could ever make you that different. you wonder why no one can explain.

The “extremely specific pretend game scenarios” turned out to be an early sign that one of my BFFs was a lesbian, but since I myself am straight, I didn’t understand why she was so much more into Princess Leia than I was (my bae was Han Solo) until much later. 😂

If I may:

Buster Keaton (Sherlock Jr., One Week)—Grandfather of slapstick and did a lot of great stunts for comedy including the first having a set piece down with him standing in the doorway still referenced today, riding a cow catcher on a locomotive, and falling from a third story building through two awnings grabbing a rain gutter falling forward and then going through a window.

Peter Falk (The Great Race, It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World)—JUST A SILLY MAN!! Sabotages four different cars (including his own, oopsie daisy) in the film The Great Race. Not film but TV, however, he is also known as the lovably silly little man Detective Columbo. Nobody knows what he's doing or where he's going at any time (even him).

These are the the quarterfinals for the scrungly little guy contest. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. If you’re confused on what a scrungle is, or any of the rules of the contest, click here.

[additional submitted propaganda + scrungly videos under the cut]

My favourite thing in the world is seeing folks act like real human beings around big celebrity personalities

reddit, how do I make my firstborn stop playing with the fans, the ornaments, and the makeup when he is supposed to be a warlord. I fear I shall raise a poet.

Absolutely based quote my dude

Service dogs and other disability assistance animals are a funny concept to me. Like of course disability itself isn't funny but the idea that sometimes people will have a highly trained live-in 24/7 professional medical assistant who also happens to be a beagle.

@knightly-reblogs exactly, you get it. That's not a doggie, that's a small man who has a job.

I'm just leaving this here: