If You Told Vin Diesel Fast And The Furious You Were Gay He'd Be Like "Some People Like Driving Stick…some

honestly will never forget this older client we had who told me how her life had gotten so much better with time and age and asked how old I was and when I told her I was 28, she said I was just a baby and reassured me I had so much time ahead of me and how much better it'll get as I grow into my life. There was such an indescribable amount of love and hope in that single interaction I think I'll hold it with me forever.

Whimsical Creatures, Mechanics, and Celestial Details Collide in Ori Toor’s Frenzied Illustrations

No they're right actually and they should say it.

The lefts descent into obsession with identity politics means all these boys get from these spaces is essentially being told they're inherently monstrous or will grow up to be so.

12 year old boys are not evil. They're children. And they're susceptible to manipulation from these fucks on the right who have sadly correctly identified that large swathes of the left will ignore and shun them. People turn to extremist factions when they feel ignored and dehumanised.

A 12 year old boy online isn't going to be able to read the nuances in your uber ironic but not really actually ironic "all white men are inherently trash" hot takes. They're going to take that at face value because they're 12 and that's what 12 year olds do. And they're going to feel angry, rejected and judged by your words. And then fucks like Andrew Tate get to swoop in and tell them that you're wrong and start the ball rolling on that indoctrination.

If you're an adult leftist and you honestly think teenage boys possess the wherewithal to purposefully follow dangerous Misogynists like Andrew Tate in order to "preserve their own privilege long term" then I'm sorry to say you're too far gone and I'd suggest logging off and actually trying to have a conversation with a kid who is vulnerable to the grooming of these uber misogynists and treat them as a human being instead of a reflection of an identity you've boxed them into.

You may tick more diversity boxes but you are still the adult. Start acting like it.

The notes on a recent post got me thinking

By nature, I’m a fan of having 2 beers and meeting strangers at a bar somewhere you’ve never been, which is a thing that we don’t do in 2023 between COVID and being afraid of one another because of the prevalence of gun violence and regular violence and misdirected road rage and the million other little deadly social erosions of the past 10 years or so.

You have got to let go of this idea that any place is a complete nothing-burger full of nothing-people.

You have to.

Its vitally important that you navigate that airport with a stranger in Denver and realize he’s got a tattoo of lyrics from your favorite song. To sing House of the Rising Sun with four people you’ve known for 2 hours (and somehow managed to get into the DNCs private bar with) in the back of an Uber in DC when it’s pissing rain and entirely too cold for your southern blood. It’s important to cooperate and solve problems together and go about it laughing and singing. We are silly little creatures that love a puzzle and a story.

It’s also important to flee a tornado in the back of a shitty red pickup at pride in Oklahoma City and feel the sky break wide-open against the lazy /tick-lok/ /tick-lok/ of the windshield wipers while racing down what once was Rte 66. Its important to know that in the face of creeping fascism that place, of all places, has entire gay neighborhoods. It’s important to wake up in an apartment high, high up in NYC and watch the sun through the buildings and boulevards and watch the glorious great goddamn of that impossible number of people all cooperating and all not. To say Hyoo-stun, that way, on purpose just to get a rise of your born and bred NY friend who does NOT think you’re funny but will make coffee for you.

You need to see a beach full of people cautiously approaching and flinching away from a floating, dead horseshoe crab on Tybee Island, Georgia the way any troupe of wild animals approaches an unknown alien thing. Cows in a field, fish in the ocean flinching from a diver. Little children squealing and wide eyed behind their parents legs. You need to be the person that walks out and picks it up and watches the rest of the crowd creep in to investigate.

I don’t get to travel a lot in the way that most people do, when I go to a place it’s usually because something bad has happened there, but I have found it universally true that most people just want to tell you a story or show you a picture on their phone of the craziest thing they’ve ever seen and they don’t particularly care who you are or what your accent is. Sometimes they do, and those people suck, but those people are not the majority.

Sometimes if you let an old redneck talk he’ll tell you everything you never wanted to know about forensic accounting. Sometimes you’ll meet someone in the middle of the biggest city in the US who knows everything about show pigs. I’ve been to the smallest Kansas towns and the biggest cities in the US and I’ve found none of them were full of nothing.

(Source)

A chance meeting of Julien Cohen and the 10-year-old prodigy Yeonah Kim at an airport. Magic happens.

Sherbet Land - Mario Kart Double Dash (with chiptune cover!)

Have a happy holidays everyone!!!

when you grew up as a lonely uncool girl it will never stop haunting you by the way. you will meet a cool person at a bar or the train station or at a friend's party and you can wear your most stylish outfit and striking eye makeup and you will swear that they can see through all of the facade and see the lonely terribly insecure teenage girl you used to be who desperately wanted to connect and you will swear that they know that there is like an insurmountable gap between you. this will happen forever

I will never stop talking about how messed up it is that in North America, short, mown grass surfaces in outdoor urban/suburban environments are seen everywhere and feel right, intuitive, and natural, when plant communities that could be described as "low grassy turf" straight-up did not exist in most of North America prior to European colonization.

Everywhere millions of acres of neglected curbs, swaths of ground separating fast food places or gas stations, spaces surrounding churches, roadsides, ditches, parks, yards, are maintained using carbon-emitting machinery as flat grass surfaces for reasons so obvious to us, we've forgotten them.

It is a labor-intensive, wasteful, effortful ritual of contempt and neglect for the land. A space of mowed grass between a gas station and a road is so utterly empty, so utterly identical to every other space of mowed grass, that the human mind doesn't even process it as "something," it's just space. No one would rest here, no one would sit here, no one uses this space, there is nothing beautiful or life-giving or important or worthy of conscious register here. It may not even occur to the mind that there is "something" in between the gas station and the road.

So many thousands and thousands of acres of space are nothingified like this. Even just a single square foot of space can be so RICH and exploding with life, if you love it. If you tend to it and give it your heart. How much land is never glanced at, hardly walked upon, except to have a lawn mower driven over it. How much life-giving habitat razed into a cruel, butchered parody of a murkily remembered European landscape.

Think how priceless a tiny little garden, a patch of sunbeams in a forest, a small trickle of stream, a single mossy log, can be! A person in communion with nature can love a place by the square inch! No place on Earth ever was "nothing!"

But all around me I see the flat carpets maintained by machines. I see so many precious square inches of Earth ignored and treated as nothing instead of loved and listened to closely and cared for.

How many strawberries could have grown here? How many little mushrooms could have popped out of this soil? How many kinds of lichen and moss could have fit on a medium-size boulder here, before it was all destroyed and made into nothing but a surface to be run over with a lawn mower?