Not enjoying the stage of debt where interest starts charging interest on itself.

The colder weather is finally here

No matter how you divide people, you have to have empathy for the ones on the other side of the line. Lawful/criminal, native/immigrant, rich/poor, you will find yourself on the other side of that line one day. Would you be okay with being treated in the manner you voted for?

Being okay is different from being okay with what's going on. Achieving the former in defiance of the latter is necessary to survive. Because it's been over 9 years, and Normal isn't coming back.

The present has arrived.

I don't trust anyone who's incapable of self-deprecating humor.

Never mistake politeness for kindness, tolerance for lenience, arrogance for confidence, cruelty for strength, empathy for weakness, excuses for reasons, punishment for justice, wealth for success, trauma for learning, experience for expertise, talking for communication, or knowing for understanding

We do not need more content

Medium fork

Home is where you find yourself.

Sophistry (n) A subtle, tricky, superficially plausible, but generally fallacious method of reasoning. ex: "Like all sophists, Charlie Kirk never actually debated in good faith; Rather, he used the appearance of debate to give his dangerous rhetoric a veneer of legitimacy."

Having thoughts about how most every other developed country has laws that punish if your home defense strategy isn't proportional to the threat, i.e. killing a burglar stealing your TV. They come from cultural notions that life is more precious than property, but there's more to it than just that.

Religious beliefs are fun to poke at sometimes. The closest I have to any are these: I believe in objective truth, and that facts are what hold up under scrutiny. I believe we are all born with good in our hearts. I believe that to be a good person means to help others and spark joy in the world.

No matter the confidence we project, living life means having worries and facing uncertainty. If you do nothing but hold them inside yourself, they will destroy you and leave behind a callous cynic who dreads their own emotions.

If your definition of "glorifying violence" includes jokes about the death of a man who spent his entire adult life actively inciting it, then this counts too. Issuing this 1st warning now is a slap in the face for laughing at a bully's misfortune after years of suffering at his hands went ignored.

Nothing like a good rainstorm to boost the old mental health

It is sheer hubris on the part is payment processors to think they can just strong arm literally everyone into not buying or selling porn without getting firebombed, shut down, strictly regulated, or nationalized. Digital commerce is a basic public service and should be treated as such.

Man, I'm just extra sensitive to random noises this week. Every little auditory event across the house or in the distance is hooking my attention, especially when I'm trying to focus.

I've just done the math, and I speak a grand total of two languages: 1 entire English 60% of Spanish 35% of Chinese 2% of German And trace amounts of like 10 other languages

Your vocal cords are actually designed to work equally well in both directions, breathing in as well as out. And look, now you're making monkey noises!

It's easy to say that the universe is cold and uncaring But We are here, together We are life We are parts of this universe that care We are the very instruments by which the universe cares

Anyone else spent their entire life honing their subconscious just so they don't have to actively think about a bunch of stuff all the time, only to spend all that thinking effort on being active about the subconscious training?

Republicans already had 6/10 stages of genocide against trans people, and are now calling for 7 & 8: Organization and Persecution, which they already demonstrated on Hispanic people. They will escalate from Alligator Auschwitz to Buchenwald in Baton Rouge. Do not remain silent and complicit. Resist.

Sorry about how much of my feed is digging into right wing social manipulation. I think a lot about it because I have family members I know are good people, yet remain trapped in front of Fox's shadow puppet show. I can't break them out of Plato's Cave without understanding why they refuse to leave.

"Don't trust the experts; because you don't understand the field, you can't understand their motives or trust them." -Fox, et. al. "Because you don't understand a field, you are vulnerable to lies about it. Trusting Joe Rogan over the CDC & WHO is the dumbest thing I've ever heard." -Me 5 years ago

Summer has finally released its grip on the front range. The forecast is entirely highs in the 70s. Gonna enjoy this while it lasts.

"Every accusation is a confession" doesn't quite capture the truth of it. Every accusation is also a false flag, a straw man used as an excuse. Every accusation is as much a declaration of intent as it is meant to fool the masses into thinking it's normal and okay to be that awful.

Your passive empathy is the amount you have for random strangers you know you'll never meet again. Do you think that amount is above or below average? The amount that would be healthy for you? The amount it should be for everyone else? The amount everyone should have for each other?

This whole week has been Wednesday.

Free will is real, and you can choose to just go do stuff. Don't let monetary limitations or depressionxiety stop you. Try something different this week. Bring a friend.

In war, death doesn't happen quickly unless it's a headshot. Most casualties bleed out over minutes of unbelievable agony and fear with limbs ripped off or guts full of lead or shrapnel. I'd sooner cut off my own hands than use them to subject a person to that pain.

The most dishonest question I've ever been asked is "Who do you believe?" In reference to cable news.

Payment processors should be the most heavily regulated companies on Earth, thoroughly held accountable. No entity that facilitates such a fundamental function as basic commerce can be allowed to exert monetary pressure. That is the power to force anyone they dislike into poverty via economic exile.

Logging onto the Internet today was a horrible mistake, holy fucking shit.

Y'know how Republicans always make it about "how people feel" about the state of things, to make it harder to call out their lies? People who argue in bad faith aren't worth engaging. Just remove them from power so we can move on and become the society our grandparents hoped we would be by now.

Gasoline doesn't want to push pistons. It just wants to burn, and set a bunch of other stuff on fire, especially more fuels. The cylinder walls prevent that and harness its power for useful work. Now imagine if gasoline was in charge of designing the engine. This post is about money in politics.

I feel like every day I wake up with a new body or brain, or like the night maintenance crew for my meat mech was replaced by gremlins, y'know? Like every morning I wake up to find out what new thing feels wrong and what mood will tint the rest of the day while I reacquaint myself with the controls.

Every university is a walkable city community of people from around the world sharing ideas & working together toward self-improvement & the betterment of the world as a whole. I dearly miss the years I spent in that environment for all the same reasons the right wants so desperately to destroy it.

The US economy enables the abusive power dynamic of service work. Workers get treated like garbage because they're being forced to do the job by the threat of poverty. A worker who can voluntarily quit and not lose everything is one that corporate and management can't abuse without consequence. #UBI

I can't remember not knowing that microwave ovens measure total energy delivered to a mass of food, whereas a conventional oven measures time exposed to a fixed temperature heating volume via surface area. Someone go ask your grandparents about their learning experiences on their first microwave.

Though these times make it difficult to live, there's no reason they should make it difficult to love. I keep my heart open, for that makes it stronger. I wear it on my sleeve, so that the world cannot hide from my compassion. I offer it freely to all, as love was always meant to be shared.

In the 'meta' of fiction, the positioning of good and evil is often warped by the forces that act upon fiction itself as a medium, like demographic targeting and mass market appeal. Thus, the bland, conventionally attractive heroes fighting queer-coded villains.

You are coasting along the 5 dimensional mountain ridge of a complex quantum Fourier transform of the probability distribution describing your every possible path through the universe, all of which you take, but only in proportion to their likelihoods, most of which are zero (plus or minus zero).

The cycle of crushing despair and resolving to push back against it is getting really fucking old. People aren't meant to live like this. Nobody should have to spend decades justifying their own existence to world governments for basic human rights. It's engineered, it's stable, and it's inhumane.

Practice doesn't make perfect. "Perfect practice makes perfect" is a theoretical and useless tautology. Practice makes it easier. Difficult things become attainable when their basic components are easy enough to not focus on. Inversely, practicing bad habits makes falling back into them easy too.

The line between true introvert and extrovert with low social stamina gets more obvious when they're partners and have to coordinate social engagements together.

"How are you?" "Not the best" "Could be better" "I've seen better days" "Just alright" "Not as good as I could be" The language we use shapes us. Are you taking the highest you've ever reached and using that as a minimum standard for the rest of your life? Stop that. Just okay is still okay.

Tonight in D&D the second highest number I rolled in the whole session was a 6. Life is like that too sometimes.

That which generates does not compose. It does not curate an experience. It is not creating for a mind that looks, reads, watches, or listens.

Notifications are not for recommendations, and if your app uses them for that, you lose all notification privileges forever.