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Posted 2 days ago
restlesslochness: I may or may not have drawn a series of Edgar Allan Poe cartoon portraits and put it on my English teacher’s office door… Zoom

restlesslochness:

I may or may not have drawn a series of Edgar Allan Poe cartoon portraits and put it on my English teacher’s office door…

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Posted 2 days ago

efferescent:

remember when a girl from my school wore a dress the same color as the green screen at prom

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oh yes

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her date did too

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Posted 2 days ago
pirated-tarheel: The longer I stare at this photo the longer I marvel at the fact that this tornado represents every essence of the term “Horrifying beauty”. 

pirated-tarheel:

The longer I stare at this photo the longer I marvel at the fact that this tornado represents every essence of the term “Horrifying beauty”. 

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Posted 2 days ago

buzzfeed:

Cartoon logic: come on now. 

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Posted 4 days ago

The Triumph of Progressivism: Graduation 2013 and 1968

robertreich:

Many of you soon-to-be college graduates are determined to make the world a better place. Some of you are choosing careers in public service or joining nonprofits or volunteering in your communities.

But many of you are cynical about politics. You see the system as inherently corrupt. You doubt real progress is possible.

“What chance do we have against the Koch brothers and the other billionaires?” you’ve asked me. “How can we fight against Monsanto, Boeing, JP Morgan, and Bank of America? They buy elections. They run America.” 

Let me remind you: Cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophesy. You have no chance if you assume you have no chance.

“But it was different when you graduated,” you say. “The sixties were a time of social progress.”

You don’t know your history. 

When I graduated in 1968, the Vietnam War was raging. Over half a million American troops were already there. I didn’t know if I’d be drafted.  A member of my class who spoke at commencement said he was heading to Canada and urged us to join him.

Two months before, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. America’s cities were burning. Bobby Kennedy had just been gunned down.  

George (“segregation forever”) Wallace was on his way to garnering 10 million votes and carrying five southern states. Richard Nixon was well on his way to becoming president.

America was still mired in bigotry. 

I remember a classmate who was dating a black girl being spit on in a movie theater. The Supreme Court had only the year before struck down state laws against interracial marriage.

My entire graduating class of almost 800 contained only six young black men and four Hispanics.

I remember the girlfriend of another classmate almost dying from a back-alley abortion, because safe abortions were almost impossible to get.

I remember a bright young woman law school graduate in tears because no law firm would hire her because she was a woman.

I remember one of my classmates telling me in anguish that he was a homosexual, fearing he’d be discovered and his career ruined. 

The environmental movement had yet not been born. Two-thirds of America’s waterways were unsafe for swimming or fishing because of industrial waste and sewage.

I remember rivers so polluted they caught fire. When the Cuyahoga River went up in flames Time Magazine described it as the river that “oozes rather than flows,” in which a person “does not drown but decays.”

In those days, universal health insurance was a pipe dream.

It all seemed pretty hopeless. I assumed America was going to hell.

And yet, reforms did occur. America changed. The changes didn’t come easily. Every positive step was met with determined resistance. But we became better and stronger because we were determined to change.

When I graduated college I would not have believed that in my lifetime women would gain rights over their own bodies, including the legal right to have an abortion. Or women would become chief executives of major corporations, secretaries of state, contenders for the presidency. Or they’d outnumber men in college.

I would not have imagined that eleven states would allow gays and lesbians to marry, and a majority of Americans would support equal marriage rights.

Or that the nation would have a large and growing black middle class.

It would have seemed beyond possibility that a black man, the child of an interracial couple, would become President of the United States.  

I would not have predicted that the rate of college enrollment among Hispanics would exceed that of whites.

Or that more than 80 percent of Americans would have health insurance, most of it through government.  

I wouldn’t have foreseen that the Cuyahoga River – the one that used to catch fire regularly – would come to support 44 species of fish. And that over half our rivers and 70 percent of bays and estuaries would become safe for swimming and fishing.

Or that some 200,000 premature deaths and 700,000 cases of chronic bronchitis would have been prevented because the air is cleaner.

Or that the portion of children with elevated levels of lead in their blood would have dropped from 88 percent to just over 4 percent.

I would not have believed our nation capable of so much positive change. 

Yet we achieved it. And we have just begun. Widening inequality, a shrinking middle class, global warming, the corruption of our democracy by big money – all of these, and more, must be addressed. To make progress on these — and to prevent ourselves from slipping backwards — will require no less steadfastness, intelligence, and patience than was necessitated before. 

The genius of America lies in its resilience and pragmatism. We believe in social progress because we were born into it. It is our national creed.

Which is to say,  I understand your cynicism. It looks pretty hopeless.

But, believe me, it isn’t.

Not if you pitch in.

I’m not graduating this year (though I would if I had stuck to the traditional 4 years of full-time college study), but this is inspiring.

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Posted 5 days ago

(Source: the-w0lfe-gifs)

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Posted 1 week ago

Panem et circenses

Earlier today I happened to think that the idea of thanking veterans for their service to the country when they were drafted or fighting in, say, Iraq seems kind of funny. I’m not sure that militaristic is the right term, but I’m currently having trouble thinking of a good word. Maybe I’m being excessively cynical, but it’s been a while since the US faced a true existential military threat. Thanking people who had little choice in whether or not they wanted to serve the interests of “the nation” seems slightly obsequious. We don’t have the draft any more (thankfully), of course, but I suppose honoring the brave men and women who have served our glorious Republic is, after all, considered to be part of patriotism.

Bread and circuses! ‘Murrica!

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Posted 1 week ago

I’m suddenly thinking it would be interesting to throw a group of people together and have them create a government. I’m not sure what number of people might be considered “ideal” for this experiment, but for some reason I’m thinking at least a thousand. I think this number might be coming from the idea of having a self-sufficient population that’d be sufficiently large to reproduce without too many negative effects, though the risk of potential future negative effects might also depend on how many people were closely related to begin with - a group consisting of several extended families is going to differ from a group consisting of, say, a thousand random young adults that aren’t closely related.

I blame this idea on my looking at the Political Compass (libertarian socialism for everyone!) and NationStates.


Of course, I’m pretty sure this idea probably won’t happen any time soon. Even if you could bring together a group of future founding citizens and sufficient supplies, there are very few hospitable places left on Earth that aren’t already under the writ of some government.

Mostly, I suppose I just think it’d be interesting to have people discussing what the best form of government would be, and setting up their own society. It’s really weird to imagine living as a sort of frontier society. You’d probably either want someone with medical training, or ready access to medical treatment.

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Posted 1 week ago

Recently:

Music: Lana Del Rey (Born to Die) and Gotye (Making Mirrors)

Gaming: Crusader Kings II (17 hours played over the course of two or three days)

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Posted 2 weeks ago

Wine and Cake

My weekend:

Played Portal for the first time (approximately 5 hours Friday through Sunday)

Bought a bottle of Barefoot Moscato wine Saturday ($9.54)

Earlier today I discovered that storing the wine on its side after opening it with a corkscrew was not the best idea. If I hadn’t completely bored through the cork of the bottle it wouldn’t have leaked onto the shelf. Oops! This is only the second bottle of wine I’ve bought (and drank), but letting one’s wine leak onto a shelf, to say nothing of spilling it, seems like a novice move.

Now I feel like I’m not sure what to do in my abundant spare time, but that really isn’t true at all. I’ve been thinking about writing some more, to say nothing of the other games and movies I’ve been thinking about enjoying.