New Hampshire Legislature Passes Bill Reversing Its Historic Trans Rights Protections
"Trump Card" Monologue
6/10/25
Scandal S05E20 – I imagine it is not an accident that this episode was called “Trump Card”: You want a sound bite? You want the truth? [Donald Trump] is a disgusting piece of trash. A relic. A man, like many other white men, who have had a free run at prosperity and opportunity. For whom discrimination and injustice are as foreign to them as the Muslim immigrants that they want to ban from our country.
Brennan Lee Mulligan in conversation with Amy Vorpahl, Adventuring Academy S1E2: “An old professor of mine had this great thing. He said, ‘On the level of individuals and civilizations, personality predates ideology.’ Meaning before you were a fascist, you were a bully and an asshole.”
Test. This should crosspost. Version posted at noon.
Test. This should crosspost.
time-compass: Try actively listening for assurance. I found | just missed it because I was so preoccupied with my own thoughts, but really today’s assurance came in the form of my roommate offering to share the dinner she made. It came in the form of my coworker raising his eyebrows, impressed with my work. I found it in my father’s hearty laugh at a gimmick I showed him. People won’t sit you down and tell you directly; switch your overanalyzing from internal to noticing good things.
hisham hm on mastodon.social: I felt like sounding off in the YouTube comments section:
k3PLP: A lot of people are too emotionally attached to the ISS. I don’t blame them, but this was ALWAYS the plan for it. It’s served its purpose, it’s getting old. Eventually, you have to replace the old with the new.
hisham_hm: We are attached to it because it represented an era of peace and international cooperation in the 90s.
US, Russian and many other countries working together to advance science. At that same time, Israeli and Palestinian leaders were shaking hands at the White House, the Berlin Wall had fallen just a few years before, and apartheid in South Africa was finally over.
The ISS felt like a step towards a Star Trek future.
Now they’re telling me they’re scrapping it and want to give the next space station to a private company, in an era where the new robber-barons are the techbro billionaires cosplaying as space moguls, Boeing builds airplanes with pieces literally falling off the sky, Israel has killed 40000 people in Gaza, Russia keeps bombing Ukraine, and a reality show rapist is leading the US polls.
Damn right we’re emotionally attached to the ISS.
“Today I learned about a term called a ‘glimmer.’ Which is the opposite of a trigger. Glimmers are those moments in your day that make you feel joy, happiness, peace, or gratitude. Once you train your brain to be on the lookout for glimmers, these tiny moments will appear more and more.”
Brennan: My grandpa, with my grandmother, was going to a church in the South during the Scopes Evolution monkey trial. Inherit the Wind.
Izzie: Inherit the Wind. Heard of it?
Brennan: Heard of it. Uh, and the preacher—as my grandfather was a huge sci-fi fan and loved, you know, the early space race stuff—and this, this teacher was like, or sorry, this preacher was like, uh, saying in this Baptist congregation in Wilson, North Carolina, like, “Those that try to plumb God’s mysteries and the mysteries of the world, it is not given to us to understand. It is not given to us to try to peel the cover from God’s mystery. We should live not knowing the the—”
And my grandfather, in church—apocryphally, this is the story I was told—my grandfather in church loudly announced from the pews, “If I thought that was true, I’d kill myself.”
Izzie: Hell yeah. Hell yeah.
Brennan: And in the drive home, apparently my grandma was hitting him in the arm, being like, “What did you do? What—what are people going to say? What are people going to think?” Like, small town in the South in the ’50s.
And he turned to her and said—and I think about this, oh, I got emotional—think about these words as like a family inheritance, where he turned to her and he said, “Darling, people don’t think, and if they do, they’re not thinking about you.”
Sir David Attenborough: “If I die while I have a pet, let my animal see my dead body, please. They understand death and seeing me dead will allow them to mourn, but if I just never show up one day they’ll think I abandoned them. I know what it feels like to be abandoned and I never want anyone to feel that way, especially my dog.”
Frank Zappa: “I think that to talk about this matter and pin it to children and use the children as a tool in order to sell this uh political device because I think that there’s a a political concept behind shutting off access to certain types of information. If you can put your foot in the door by saying we’re going to stop dirty words, that literally means you put in force the mechanism to stop other ideas. Once that censorship board is there, they have to find things for themselves to do when they run out of dirty words. And they’re not going to unemploy themselves.”
vellichor (vell-ich-or), n. [Eng.] The strange wistfulness of used bookstores.
Finland didn’t end homelessness with magic. They just didn’t treat it like a business plan.
You can still run a café, start a band, sell socks online. Capitalism still works in Finland. But they decided that housing people didn’t need to turn a profit.
Because sometimes, the moral thing is the practical thing. And no one thrives when their neighbour is sleeping in a tent by the river.
You can’t KPI your way out of a crisis. Sometimes, you just have to give a damn.
Scientist: “The escaped animal is a polar bear with the ability to survive in the Arctic and Antarctic. It exhibits massive mood swings like that of a manic depressive, and has equal sexual desires for both males and females.”
Boss: “Dear God, are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?”
Scientist: “That’s right. A bi-polar, bipolar bi polar bear.”
Rohita Kadambii: “I spent my childhood watching ‘The Sound of Music’ (1965) and ‘Cabaret’ (1972), so I really thought the rise of fascism would have more showtunes.”
Maya Angelou: “Trying to make it simpler, trying to make it beautiful, trying to make the language sing.”
odasrauttier: “Inside you there are two wolves. One is active, the other one is on hot standby and becomes active if the first one fails or is taken down for maintenance. Add more wolves as necessary for increased redundancy load balancing. A quorum badger can be added for environments with multiple active wolves.”