“When you’re not used to being confident, confidence feels like arrogance. When you’re used to being passive, assertiveness feels like aggression. When you’re not used to getting your needs met, prioritizing yourself feels selfish. Your comfort zone is not a good benchmark.”
Quotes
Wednesday, July 2
“I would rather adjust my life to your absence, than adjust my boundaries to accommodate your disrespect.”
Paul F. Haacker, Canadian public radio journalist: “Here in Canada, many of us believe we are witnessing the fall of the U.S. empire. Would a civilized country limit health care or food assistance for the poor; leave crops rotting in the fields; destroy the educational system; target women and attempt to eliminate their reproductive rights while refusing to help resulting babies; abuse desperate immigrants; pretend to believe in Christianity while perverting and debasing its tenets; and refuse to protect the Earth from destruction? The world is watching.”
Bill Moyers: The NRA is the enabler of death — paranoid, delusional, and as venomous as a scorpion. With the weak-kneed acquiescence of our politicians, the National Rifle Association has turned the Second Amendment of the Constitution into a cruel and deadly hoax.
“Some of these sex changers can flip with astonishing frequency. The chalk bass (Serranus torugarum), a neon-blue Caribbean fish that’s about the size of your thumb, has been known to switch sex up to twenty times a day. Chalk bass don’t do this in order to play the field; quite the opposite - switching sex is their recipe for relationship success. Chalk bass are known to display unusual levels of sexual fidelity and are considered more or less monogamous. Their sex change habits are a coordinated response with their long-term partner. Researchers believe that taking turns laying eggs, which are bigger and more energy-consuming to produce than sperm, keeps the reproductive investment fair. Each fish fertilizes as many eggs as it produces. Proving that even with fish you get what you give in a relationship.”
Tuesday, July 1
The Irony is Astounding: Thomas Horman, the acting ICE director, told Tucker Carlson that he objects to being compared to Nazis because ICE is ‘simply following orders.’
Sunday, June 29
Jessa Crispin: “America doesn’t really make things. Even in its financial system, the highest rewards go to those who speculate, making bets on things that other people have created but creating nothing real or tangible in itself. Jessa and Nico discuss the difficulty in reversing the trend toward service and virtual production as well as the effects that working in the spectral rather than material realms has on a human.”
“Boss, it’s the fascism. You’re completely gunked up with cortisol due to the fact that your entire daily life is now underscored with a haunting awareness of the rapid erosion of your rights, dignity, and any and all social safety nets, and you’re also bearing witness to the most vulnerable people immediately being persecuted. This creates a natural stress response that basically means you’re going to continue having memory and organizational problems, as well as emotional imbalances.”
“Anybody can change from being fit and healthy to sick and bedbound. Anybody can develop chronic health conditions or become disabled or terminally ill. Anybody can change from being employed to unemployed and unable to work. These things can happen to anybody. Anybody.”
“Hope is a risk; especially when you’ve known what it is to dream for better and only be met with the tyranny of degradation, greed, and violent appetites. But despair is a concession. Be careful of who you let regulate your dreaming. Always remember who benefits from our hopelessness.”
Thursday, June 26
Tuesday, June 24
Drink water. Make your bed. Get dressed up. Gratitude journal. Take a break. Be authentic. Give a compliment. Have a healthy snack. Drink water. Let go. Be nice. Read books. Celebrate small wins. Get in shape. Say no. Be thankful. Be selfish. Lather yourself in coconut oil. Speak up. Start a business. Read frequently. Exercise. Lather yourself in coconut oil. Forgive yourself. Drink water. Pet animals.
Guardian cartoon: World War 3!? Whose idea was that?
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
imgur.com/gallery/r… ORANGE: World War 3!? Is that good? Whose idea was that? Israel bombed Iran first and now the USA is bombing Iranian nuclear sites, the world is up in arms and maybe even ending! What is going on!? I’m frightened! BEIGE: It’s all for a good cause. You should know that Israel was forced to bomb Iran in preemptive self-defence in order to achieve peace through strength. ORANGE: Israel bombed Iran first?
Wednesday, June 18
“You mustn’t let the dystopian nightmare bullshit dim your fucking sparkle.”
“Whether or not they think he was the actual son of God, they all agree he preached tolerance and forgiveness, a message so important his most ardent followers would eventually start killing anyone who didn’t want to hear it.”
Friday, June 13
WOTD: ‘fellow-feel’ (verb; 17th-century): to share in the suffering and distress of others.
Tuesday, June 10
"Trump Card" Monologue
Tuesday, June 10, 2025
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.”
Monday, June 9
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.
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.”
“ADHD people screenshotting and bookmarking everything because they’re afraid of losing ideas only to never look at them again because the archive is now its own overwhelming problem.”
Sunday, June 8
Trump on Biden’s cancer： “I don’t feel sorry for him”.
Wednesday, June 4
Quotes from the 73-year-old woman who sits in the back of [someone's] ethics class and knits during lectures
Wednesday, June 4, 2025
“Sweetheart, if they text you after 11 p.m., it’s not ethics. It’s hormones.” “I didn’t come here to get a degree. I came here to see what the youth are stressed about and bring snacks accordingly.” “He ghosted you? Oh honey. Block him and light a candle. For yourself.” “I once survived a cheating husband, a power outage, and disco. You can survive this exam.” “You don’t need closure. You need carbs and a nap.