I need a little help here

me decoding and reading the message

tumblr is one of the only places i will actually unmute a video when the tags are like "omg unmute it" bc i know most everyone else on this website loves reading and hates noise like i do so it must be pretty good

googling shit like "why do i feel bad after hanging out with my friends" and all of the answers are either "you need better friends" (i don't; my friends are wonderful) or "your social battery is drained, you need to rest and regain your energy levels" (i don't; i've got tons of energy, it's just manifesting as over-the-top neurotic mania). why is this even happening. it's like some stupid toll i have to pay as a punishment for enjoying myself too much

I actually, genuinely think social event aftercare would fix me. I need someone to put me to bed and say "you were fun today and no one hated you"

tags via @ratbastarddotfuck

Fred Hampton Jr visiting his father on Father’s Day…his grave is annually shot by local police

.Some context for this:

-Fred Hampton was a black activist from Chicago – an extraordinary speaker, youth organizer for the NAACP. 

-He joined the Black Panthers and shone so brightly that he was made chair of the Chicago chapter when he was only 20.

-He founded the Rainbow Coalition, which brought together Black and Latino activists and radical anti-poverty Catholics.  He forged an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them make peace and work for social change.

-In 1967, when he was just 19, Hampton was identified by the FBI as a “radical threat.” The FBI tried to subvert his activities in Chicago, sowing disinformation to get the groups he’d drawn together to distrust each other, and getting an FBI plant next to him as a bodyguard.  

-(This is part of an illegal FBI program called COINTELPRO, which aimed to paint black civil rights activists (among others) as violent and threatening.  If you’ve only seen pictures of the Black Panthers as armed and dangerous revolutionaries, and never heard of their children’s breakfast program, their community health clinics, or their “copwatch” patrols, this is why.   It’s because COINTELPRO was a highly successful work of political propaganda.)  

-On December 3, 1969, Hampton taught a political education course at a local church, and then several Panthers gathered at his apartment for a late dinner.  One of them was the FBI plant bodyguard, who drugged Hampton.  

-At 4:45 AM on December 4, a squad of Chicago Police officers and FBI agents with a warrant to search for weapons stormed the apartment. Investigations later showed they fired between 90 and 99 times.  The Panther on security detail, Mark Clark, was holding a shotgun.  He was shot, and the gun went off into the ceiling.  This was the only shot fired by the Panthers. 

-Fred Hampton, in another room, didn’t awaken.  He was shot in his bed.  Twice, in the head, at point-blank range.  He was 21.  

-Four weeks after witnessing Hampton’s death, his finance Deborah Johnson gave birth to their son, Fred Hampton Jr.  That’s him in the photograph, visiting the grave of a father who died before he was born.  A resting place riddled with bullets.  

YouGov did a whole official poll on Americans' views of the middle ages and I’m obsessed

I'm in the 9% of respondents who think that the black death was based

*dipping a dart into an unlabelled flask and loading it into my crossbow* you better not try anything stupid because i don't even remember what this one does

Kronk behavior.

@capriceandwhimsy

I dunno maybe I’m way way off base and I’m gonna pay for it later in life but I just don’t think that letting my kid dip a few pretzel sticks in Nutella an hour before dinner should be considered morally unconscionable.

When I say my closer to three then two year old will eat anything I mean the only 2 things she refuses to eat are carrots and a peanutbutter. She eats soup, she eats all of her food touching, she eats salad and sushi and peas and chili and any form of potato available, and I think it’s because I just refuse to have food rules. She gets to have eggs and fruit snacks for breakfast if that’s what she asks for. We usually have baby charcuterie for lunch. We always have dessert. Sometimes we have dessert and then dinner. Sometimes we stop dinner in the middle of the meal for some cake and then we go back to dinner. It drives most people in our life insane. Even the most open and understanding people.

I spent so many years with such insane food rules and thinking certain foods were good and others were bad and I still fight with it and hatred towards my body that we’re fed from the youngest age and I refuse to let that happen to her.

So no she doesn’t have to finish her plate to get ice cream. She doesn’t have to eat all her veggies to be excused. She’s allowed to enjoy food as it comes to her as she learns and experiences it. And so far it’s paid off she’ll literally eat anything.

Except peanut butter

We do have a weird distrust issue where she does not believe we are all eating the same thing for dinner (we literally always are) and she has to go around to every bowl like Goldilocks and take a bite from everyone’s before she is satisfied

Like girlie we’re all eating chili. Idk what to tell you.

She was poisoned in a past life

Stop it this is the funniest addition to my post because she truly investigates like a queen who her people are trying to poison her

there are some internet friends where eventually you start calling them by their real name and then there’s times where its like nah son your name is crispy forever

I remember sci-fi/hacker media from the late 80s - early 2000s, full of people with names like Hagbard and Cereal and Hiro Protagonist. My response was always “aw man, so in the future we not only get to choose our names, but we can make our own cool unique ones that are related to the activities and identities we actually care about? This is awesome! I wish I had friends who had cool names based on their self identities. I wanna hang out with people named Y.T. and Whistler, but I’m stuck here in the suburbs with my friends Bob and Doug. So lame.” Flash forward twenty five years, I’ve transitioned to male and I’ve started writing under the pen name Idal Waves. I’m talking to a family member about my friends and contemporaries and as I discuss people with names like Shoe and Fork and Evac, I realize that modern-day queer names and modern-day online handles are just the same as those dream hacker names of the early days of cyberpunk fantasy. They’re the identifiers that are chosen so you can do something cool, something so cool that you get a whole new name that you choose to describe yourself. A name for the world we choose to inhabit, not the one we’re stuck with.

Congratulations, pre-teen me. We made it. We’re cool as fuck and we got to choose our names and define ourselves and hang around with other people who do the same. The cyberpunk adults were right. It’s fucking awesome, just like you thought it would be.

Sorry about the name though, I know you were hoping for something you thought was awesome like Shadow or Goremaster.

my actual friends and lovers call me roach, like the bug. family and coworkers call me ray, a compromise name for the most boring parts of my life. once my mom asked me if my friend ‘lizard’ had a real name and was amused when i said that *was* her real name. ‘her mom named her lizard?’ my mom asked, as though a mother’s name for a baby would have anything to do with who that person really is.

i learned this lesson from a deadhead in the late 80s or so, guy by the name of wharf rat, and i asked him once what his real name was, and he said “wharf rat”. like, yeah, there’s a name on his ID that isn’t that but no one calls him anything else. okay you know what, you have convinced me. thanks, wharf rat. you were 100% right.

I love this gold effect every time I use it

I'm debating making a second, larger bowl. I think even with a significantly lower flow I'm gonna need higher sides and more space for splashing.

Also! This piece will be on exhibit at the Garrett Museum from Oct-Dec this year, with these pieces:

honestly we used to have hard rock but now all we have is metal. what happened

why do i even bother

Welp found the Adolf Eichmann of the Trump Admin

You make sure those cattle cars run on time, buddy.

I cannot get over this. They have a fucking Adolf Eichmann.

For those of you who don't know his whole deal, Adolf Eichmann was the primary bureaucrat/administrator behind the Holocaust. Overseeing supply chains, ensuring rail infrastructure was in place, collecting lists of Jews, etc.

He fled to Argentina after the war and, after a complex series of events, was found in the late 50s. The Mossad carried out an illegal extradition (which the Argentine government was, by all accounts, aware of and cool with), brought him to Jerusalem, put him on trial (you know, Hannah Arendt's whole thing, and the setting of my profile pic of Zivia) and he was hanged on June 1, 1962.

this... disturbs me way more than just donald trump. trump in power without logistics is just a talking head making threats. none of the large-scale evil in the world would be possible if it were just one guy at a time doing stuff.

evil needs people who will comply, but more than that, it needs people who will plan, and manage, and structure things. to keep timetables and ledgers. they need a whole chain of people who want to make these evil things happen.

so. todd lyons. may he accomplish nothing and make no name for himself.

keep each other safe. don't talk to ICE.

You are describing the very topic of Arendt’s work: the banality of evil.

For the last like 2000 years you could get pussy just by being a guy. Now with divorce and the pill and women having jobs and bank accounts and shit, things have changed. If youre a dude and you want pussy you actually have to ask nicely. This will lead to the collapse of several nation states.

"there's a guy in the walls" movies exist in a universe that I fucking WISH was real. imagine how easy it would be to install stuff in walls if the space behind a wall was not 3.5 inches/8.9 cm deep and I could get my whole self in there. of course that would mean a guy could get in there too, but what are the odds.

<currently blogging from inside this idiot's walls>

PLEASE help me feed these ethernet cables downstairs or I'm gonna kill myself before you get a crack at me

thread it down here champ, we'll get this installed come hell or high water

you are the best scary murderer who could have ever crawled into my walls

My girlfriend is on a cruise so while she’s gone I’m gonna cut the sleeves off of all my shirts

why

She’s pretty much 85% of my impulse control

This post is around 10 years old and I just had someone bring it up to me at a wedding

We never really talked about it but The Ugly Ducking that grew up to be a beautiful swan was still probably pretty fugly from a duck’s perspective

Like that story isn’t about an ugly duckling that grew up sexy, it’s a fucking swan was judged as a duck and hated itself as a duck until it found out it wasn’t a duck and stopped trying to be a duck.

The actual ducks in the neighborhood were probably still looking around at perfectly normal swans like “damn, look at those busted ass ducks”

This is pretty important, actually. The good ending is finding the other swans, not tearing yourself to pieces trying to impress the ducks.

I cannot overstate how much I love Tom Lehrer's story. It sounds so fake but is entirely real.

He's a goddamn genius- he started studying mathematics at Harvard when he was 15 and graduated magna cum laude. He worked at Los Alamos for a few years before being drafted and working for the NSA, where he claims to have invented jello shots to get around alcohol bans.

He then went back to Harvard for a couple years before starting to teach political science at MIT.

Through all of that, he was writing and performing both some of the funniest shit you'll ever hear (Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, Masochism Tango) and absolutely scathing political satire (Who's Next, Wernher von Braun, Send the Marines). Until the mid/late 60s counterculture gained momentum. He didn't like their aesthetic, so he stopped making music.

Shortly after, he moved to California and started teaching math and musical theater history at the UC Santa Cruz for the next 30 years.

I don't know if non-Californians understand just how goddamn funny that is. It's where stoners and math (and now computer science) kids who couldn't get into Berkeley go. Leaving Harvard/MIT for UCSC is peak academic phoning it in. And by all accounts he had a blast.

Plus the whole putting all of his music in the public domain thing. That fucked.

Also he is still alive! 95 years old as of November 2023.

The other day @piecesoftape sent me a text that said, "you probably got a notification for this, but Tom Lehrer outlived Kissinger."

There's a quote attributed to Lehrer, probably in answer to why he stopped performing, that "political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize."

I am delighted to report Tom Lehrer is still with us as of January 13, 2025.

He also discovered an English rhyme for "orange," which famously doesn't rhyme with anything.

It's an internal rhyme (parts of two words), but it still rhymes, and the poem goes thusly:

"Eating an orange while making love

Leads to bizarre enjoyment thereof."

happy 97th birthday Tom Lehrer