misfiled as "Keet, Electric" @ElectricKeet@awoo.space

(Sung to the tune of your favorite bar song)

🎼 Oh you'll all love the story of Splatty,
The horn-mage who thought she could fly,
she studied all her spells a plenty
then lobbed herself into the sky!

But once she was there she grew frightened,
as she watched all the ground whizzing by...

well you know we all call the foal Splatty...

And now you can say you know why!

Feet.
The stuff leg ends are made of.

I just found the most AMAZING website!!

"Explain Shell" - exactly what it says on the tin. :D :D

https://www.explainshell.com/explain?cmd=wget+-P+%2Fpath%2Fto%2Fdestination%2Fdirectory%2F+-mpck+--user-agent%3D%22%22+-e+robots%3Doff+--wait+1+-E+https%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2F

@PentagramPip I'd go even deeper - the core concept of "people who perform better deserve more stuff" is unjust. There is no reason not to guarantee fulfillment and comfort to everyone when we have such abundance, and there is no one in the world going through their life like "gee I can't wait to underperform today, I love not contributing to things" - no hypothetical person *deserving* of punishment for the things they don't do

Laziness doesn't exist. People don't have control over their abilities. And even if they did, depriving people of their basic rights when they don't contribute as much still wouldn't be just

"Lemme see what you have!"

[Microsoft Sam Voice] (baby running past) "ARBITRARY CODE EXECUTION IN CHROME EXTENSIONS"

"NO!"

50 years ago Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing

Being Kubrick he insisted on shooting it on location

Every DnD class has the Catch Arrow feat.

Monks just know how to do it gracefully.

so, USDA headquarters is moving to Kansas City (they're not sure which Kansas City yet, just one of them) and firing 2/3 of their researchers along the way. I think this is a good idea and genuinely necessary; the loss of research careers is an unfortunate but unavoidable cost because that happens whenever an HQ moves.

Washington DC is a terrible spot for the center of agricultural policy in the United States. It is not geographically or culturally near where agriculture mostly happens in the United States, and it has completely unrelated weather patterns.

I want the USDA right in the fucking middle of climate change. I want them right where crops are being ruined by year after year of extreme weather - droughts followed by mass flooding, mostly down the Mississippi river. Well, this gives the USDA a front row seat to the chronic flooding of the Mississippi River to levels thought of as something that would happen "once every 500 years", three times in the last decade. This gives the USDA a front row seat to droughts destroying the wheat crop. This gives the USDA a front row seat to seasons of rain that turn fields into swamps and make planting impossible. These are things they should have a front row seat to.

This puts the USDA somewhere geographically closer to the majority of agricultural work in the United States. It puts them closer to the best agricultural colleges and universities in the United States - real STEM degrees that are just too blue collar to take seriously on the coasts.

Mostly I'm pissed off at seeing an attempt to put some part of the Federal government in the region I grew up in taken to be unavoidably part of an evil plot to destroy science. No, that's not plausible; it is going to create science careers in an impoverished part of the nation where no such careers can easily be had, but there's an awful lot of on-the-ground experience and people trained for those careers. The "Brain drain" people are afraid of from losing people already working at USDA headquarters? That's already happened, much worse than could ever happen by moving the USDA, by keeping agricultural policy away from agricultural parts of the nation. It ensures that people who know what they're doing can't create a voting bloc or strong opinion in the Midwest, taking a bunch of trained scientists out of swing states.

Let "flyover country" have its say in part of the government. Putting the USDA in Washington D.C. is a historical accident; there's never a "good time" to move it but the move seems clearly warranted to me. Make the USDA live in the middle of where their policies land and their policies will improve because they get to see the results of their policies through some lens other than media and lobbyists.

Moving the USDA out of D.C. weakens the power of agricultural lobbying because it moves the USDA closer to real agriculture and farther away from Lobbyist Central. D.C. is not a real place, it's a drug-fueled collective hallucination created primarily by lobbyists, and decentralizing our bizarrely concentrated Federal government can only help.

🚫 convergent evolution in sci fi means everyone is a funny-looking humanoid

✅ convergent evolution in sci-fi means every sufficiently-complex society eventually achieves communism through public libraries consolidating all social services

If you boil a funny bone, you make a laughing stock

Vielleichthabendeutschwortenfueretwas, proposed noun, “I bet the Germans have a word for this concept.”

Jazz? On my NES? It's more likely than you think!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5vyQO81qNc

First the Internet gave us access to everything. Then it gave everything access to us.

A friend of mine posted a link to a history of the Autism Network International, a group formed by a number of autistic people who had met through autism-parent-focused conferences and wanted to make a space for themselves and each other, and I am really appreciating the story.

The author recounts a number of struggles experienced by the group, notably including some attempts to undermine and sabotage it by leaders of the preexisting NT-led autism-focused organizations (a phenomenon which has occurred on the occasion of the self-organization of many marginalized groups) and the group being forced to adapt due to a toxic autistic person causing trouble ... but the parts that stand out to me are the successes.

- The people with social struggles finding communities where they are normalized and accepted.
- The solidarity between autistic people, NT friends, and 'cousins' - a delightful name originated by one of the group for people whose neurodivergences bear striking similarities to autism as opposed to neurotypicality.
- The way that the development of this network into a community demonstrates the empathy and social skills that autistic people are often claimed to lack.

http://www.autreat.com/History_of_ANI.html is the link for people who might be interested.

The way structural bigotry works in society, there are several things that happen in concert to everyone:

- We are denied knowledge about the experiences of people who society marginalizes,

- We are taught lies about the marginalized that support the violence (overt or covert) that society enacts on them, and

- We are taught that an appropriate and proportional response to someone trying to educate you is discomfort, distress, harassment, verbal abuse, gaslighting, or quite a lot of other very nasty defense mechanisms.

Those of us in marginalized groups will often be able or forced to see through the lies and learn the suppressed truths that affect ourselves, but that's not a guarantee and it doesn't cover everything. Ultimately, it's down to us to manage our discomfort, seek out education, learn, understand, and teach.

And people have been doing that since before we were born, and will have to do it for probably as long as any of us will live. And people have been and will end up refusing to do it likewise.

It's not just us the marginalized getting clued in, it's us the privileged as well. It's not just us the privileged who need luck or active effort to be clued in, it's us the marginalized as well. Because "marginalized" and "privileged" aren't traits taken at character creation that give a set of bonuses and penalties to ability checks - they are shorthand descriptions of phenomena that operate through comprehensible mechanisms. And comprehension is a tool we can use to counter them.