As To Whether The Gavle Goat's Consumption Should Be Seen As A Good Omen Or A Bad Omen, I'd Say Good.

I know how bleak things seem.

I am not going to lie to you. There is no gurantee you, or me or any of us make it, and taste a better life.

Happiness. Sincerity. Tranquility. Peace. Love. Rest and leisure. Celebration. Cooperation, building something beautiful and meaningful together. A better, more just, more natural life.

None of it is guranteed.

We are balancing on a razor's edge as we ascend closer and closer to our crucible, to our defining moment as a sapient species on the cusp of a new age. Things can go horribly wrong. We have seen sickly dread, clawing woe and untenable rage in our hearts that reverberates through our times. Biblical times, apocalyptic times. Reality may be even worse than the cries of mothers, the silent blood, the vivid imaginations of dystopia.

But, I want you to understand that this is just one possibility.

There is a better world. It may be veiled, we have stumbled through fog and tunnels for so long that we don't believe there is a light anymore. But it is there, and it is not as excruciatingly impossible to hold together as it seems. Tunnels end. Just as we may be staring down the barrel of a gun, we are just as likely simply experiencing a dark, long night before our dawn we so shamefully crave.

Do not be ashamed. You are not weak, you are not naive, you are not stupid. You are a unique shade in a most wonderful swatch of color. We have all been polluted by a system, a feedback loop, a fetishization of fear that has grown its own legs and operates beyond the control of any single person. We are our worst selves right now, it is remarkable we are functioning at all despite everything thrown at us.

It is not doomed to be in vain. The odds on paper do not look great--it is easy to rationalize defeat. Have faith. Have some secret hope tucked away, even when it repulses your sensibilities. History is littered with the impossible being done by those who scoffed at barriers set by naysayers--having the gall to try despite seemingly imminent defeat is what wins the day far, certainly far more often than throwing in the towel before halftime.

Maybe it WILL be in vain. Maybe something miraculous will happen, something unexpected, something that couldn't have happened if we all resigned too soon. Do not be so arrogant as to assume you know the future, you can't possibly, there are variables you cannot possibly forsee at play here.

I know how bleak things seem. I am asking you to try anyways.

I think people on EBT should be allowed to eat at a five star restaurant for completely free once a month minimum and I'm not joking. It should be a human right to have the roses not just the bread.

I don’t know if I’m late to the party here noticing this, but @staff what the actual hell is this. This is what I get when I click on the link to my own mantis shrimp post, shared on Twitter. I can see the first half, and then I get forced to log-in to keep reading.

I write a free blog on your free platform, and you’re using link sharing on mobile to try to force people to sign up? Not only is this absolutely not okay - this isn’t a paywalled site and my content isn’t subscription only - but it really fucks me over as a science communicator who relies on posts being shared easily to disseminate information.

This is absolutely not okay. I’ve used this site for eight years to do for science outreach and loved it. This choice leaves a really nasty taste in my mouth.

excerpt from In Memoriam by David Wojnarowicz, Day Without Art, 1989

All The Beauty And The Bloodshed, 2022

Or water fountains, public washrooms, outdoors tables, etc, etc

Nobody is making anyone go into scriptwriting. No one is born in a Netflix company town where their dad takes them into the script mines at age 12. Fuck writers who want to get paid more than once for the same job. They should only get residuals AFTER all the people who do REAL WORK, like construction, grips, costume, makeup & animators etc. Most of them are much better at their jobs than writers especially for streaming services, and they are what screenwriters can lean on & novelists can't.

People need to realize that the unions for white collar people like WGA or SIEU or NEA (public sector unions are why cops who kill the people they were supposed to serve & protect remain employed get pensions) is not the AFL-CIO or any other historical union fighting for the lives of the people who built the country's industry and made it run, any more than the NRA are the Minutemen of 1775 New England.

First, go fuck yourself, you fucking scab. No, seriously - you don't come to my blog and spout off about what workers deserve unions and decent pay and what ones don't, like it's your fucking decision. The intellectual labor that writers perform is just as real as any other work done on a film set - "all who labor by hand or brain" is the inherent logic of industrial unionism for a reason.

Second, writers aren't asking to get paid more than once: residuals are deferred pay, you absolute moron. In Hollywood, whether it's writers or actors or voice talent or whatever, you get a small fraction up front - it's usually an ok check, depending on the union's day rates and so forth, but you can't make a living off stitching these together - and then most of your pay comes from monthly royalty checks that provide you with the income you need to live off when you're between jobs.

The problem is that, historically in Hollywood, residuals have been structured with a very long "tail" - the payments start out relatively low and then get more generous over time as the show has more seasons and (presumably) goes into syndication. This doesn't work with streaming's new business model, where increasingly shows are getting 2-3 seasons max and streaming services have become increasingly quick to not just cancel shows but yank them off their servers in order to avoid paying residuals.

So what WGA writers are fighting for is a system that ensures writers (but also actors and other creative workers, because the unions pattern bargain) get a fair share of the show's revenue, even if the show is only given 2-3 seasons.

Third, the U.S labor movement would not exist today if it wasn't for white collar workers and public sector workers. About half of the U.S labor movement - 7 million workers - is public sector, and those workers are overwhelmingly women of color, mostly working as either teachers or postal workers. Likewise, about half the U.S labor movement is made up of white collar workers, and we're graduate students and adjuncts and lab researchers, teachers and social workers, administrators and IT departments.

I'm both public sector and white collar, and I'm a member of an NEA union. I'm an adjunct professor who earns $6,000 a course and it's my job to get working adults with jobs and families who've never gone to college or who've been out of higher ed for a decade to graduate with a bachelor's or a master's. If you don't think that's real work, you're free to research and write all the lectures and powerpoints, deliver those in an entertaining and educational fashion, answer a flood of questions from students who need help navigating academia, and then grade all the midterms and finals and research papers.

national identities were a hoax invented by Big Nineteenth Century to sell more fascism

Laika: 1954-1957

Opportunity Rover: 2004-2019