STOP. DON'T SCROLL. READ THIS TO SAVE LIVES IN GAZA. Below Are Some VETTED Campaigns To Support Gazans.

25 ways to be a little more punk in 2025

Cut fast fashion - buy used, learn to mend and/or make your own clothes, buy fewer clothes less often so you can save up for ethically made quality

Cancel subscriptions - relearn how to pirate media, spend $10/month buying a digital album from a small artist instead of on Spotify, stream on free services since the paid ones make you watch ads anyway

Green your community - there's lots of ways to do this, like seedbombing or joining a community garden or organizing neighborhood trash pickups

Be kind - stop to give directions, check on stopped cars, smile at kids, let people cut you in line, offer to get stuff off the high shelf, hold the door, ask people if they're okay

Intervene - learn bystander intervention techniques and be prepared to use them, even if it feels awkward

Get closer to your food - grow it yourself, can and preserve it, buy from a farmstand, learn where it's from, go fishing, make it from scratch, learn a new ingredient

Use opensource software - try LibreOffice, try Reaper, learn Linux, use a free Photoshop clone. The next time an app tries to force you to pay, look to see if there's an opensource alternative

Make less trash - start a compost, be mindful of packaging, find another use for that plastic, make it a challenge for yourself!

Get involved in local politics - show up at meetings for city council, the zoning commission, the park district, school boards; fight the NIMBYs that always show up and force them to focus on the things impacting the most vulnerable folks in your community

DIY > fashion - shake off the obsession with pristine presentation that you've been taught! Cut your own hair, use homemade cosmetics, exchange mani/pedis with friends, make your own jewelry, duct tape those broken headphones!

Ditch Google - Chromium browsers (which is almost all of them) are now bloated spyware, and Google search sucks now, so why not finally make the jump to Firefox and another search like DuckDuckGo? Or put the Wikipedia app on your phone and look things up there?

Forage - learn about local edible plants and how to safely and sustainably harvest them or go find fruit trees and such accessible to the public.

Volunteer - every week tutoring at the library or once a month at the humane society or twice a year serving food at the soup kitchen, you can find something that matches your availability

Help your neighbors - which means you have to meet them first and find out how you can help (including your unhoused neighbors), like elderly or disabled folks that might need help with yardwork or who that escape artist dog belongs to or whether the police have been hassling people sleeping rough

Fix stuff - the next time something breaks (a small appliance, an electronic, a piece of furniture, etc.), see if you can figure out what's wrong with it, if there are tutorials on fixing it, or if you can order a replacement part from the manufacturer instead of trashing the whole thing

Mix up your transit - find out what's walkable, try biking instead of driving, try public transit and complain to the city if it sucks, take a train instead of a plane, start a carpool at work

Engage in the arts - go see a local play, check out an art gallery or a small museum, buy art from the farmer's market

Go to the library - to check out a book or a movie or a CD, to use the computers or the printer, to find out if they have other weird rentals like a seed library or luggage, to use meeting space, to file your taxes, to take a class, to ask question

Listen local - see what's happening at local music venues or other events where local musicians will be performing, stop for buskers, find a favorite artist, and support them

Buy local - it's less convenient than online shopping or going to a big box store that sells everything, but try buying what you can from small local shops in your area

Become unmarketable - there are a lot of ways you can disrupt your online marketing surveillance, including buying less, using decoy emails, deleting or removing permissions from apps that spy on you, checking your privacy settings, not clicking advertising links, and...

Use cash - go to the bank and take out cash instead of using your credit card or e-payment for everything! It's better on small businesses and it's untraceable

Give what you can - as capitalism churns on, normal shmucks have less and less, so think about what you can give (time, money, skills, space, stuff) and how it will make the most impact

Talk about wages - with your coworkers, with your friends, while unionizing! Stop thinking about wages as a measure of your worth and talk about whether or not the bosses are paying fairly for the labor they receive

Think about wealthflow - there are a thousand little mechanisms that corporations and billionaires use to capture wealth from the lower class: fees for transactions, interest, vendor platforms, subscriptions, and more. Start thinking about where your money goes, how and where it's getting captured and removed from our class, and where you have the ability to cut off the flow and pass cash directly to your fellow working class people

No one:

Absolutely no one:

Typical PB&J duo shenanigans that occur when the show’s plot finally focuses on them:

“There’s no platonic explanation for tha-“

A post I recently came across (elsewhere) about the Jedi made me realize there seems to be some crucial misunderstandings about love versus attachment.

(Full disclosure: for a very long time I didn't understand the difference either. It's only in the last few years that I've come to appreciate the nuances.)

Context: the post claimed that Kanan and Hera prove the Jedi were wrong about feelings/love.

Love and attachment are two very different things. I would even go so far as to say that attachment doesn't allow for real love.

We see in the prequel era that the Jedi Order largely didn't allow for (especially biological) familial or marital/romantic relationships because of the risk for attachment. Sometimes we take this to mean the Jedi Order didn't approve of feelings/love.

But Anakin was absolutely correct when he told Padme that the Jedi endorse compassion, which is (a form of) love. Calm, joy, and peace are all feelings, too, all of which the Jedi encourage. What the Jedi warn against is acting on negative feelings: hate, anger, fear, etc.

So, Anakin was not wrong for loving his mother and Padme, just like Kanan was not wrong for loving Hera and the other members of the Ghost crew as family.

The difference is that Anakin caved in to attachment - he allowed his fear of losing Shmi and then Padme to turn into possessiveness/obsessiveness, to turn into selfishness, which overpowered his love for them. Massacring the Tuskens wasn't an act of love for Shmi. Neither was siding with Palpatine an act of love for Padme, even though Anakin deluded himself into thinking so. All of that was done out of hate and anger and fear.

Kanan, on the other hand, loved others but did not become attached. He taught Ezra how to use the Force as a Jedi would, while accepting that if Ezra did end up turning to the Dark Side, that was Ezra's choice to make - Kanan's responsibility was simply to teach Ezra the best he could. He loved Hera and was basically her husband, but he was willing to step back and let others take the lead when she needed to be rescued. Kanan let go of the things he couldn't control, and he did not become possessive. He truly acted out of selfless love for his family.

Now, personally I think the Jedi generally promoting no marriage/families and no relationships with birth families is a bit on the "overkill" side in trying to stamp out attachment. (Note: while I don't fully agree with the Jedi Order's stance here, I still respect their choice to live that way; much like I personally wouldn't choose to follow the CotW's helmet rule but I don't begrudge them choosing to adhere to it.) And Kanan DOES prove that one can decide against following that tradition while still being a Jedi and not falling to the Dark Side.

But the reason why Kanan is able to succeed where Anakin does not is because Kanan understands the difference between love and attachment, and he remains a Jedi by avoiding the latter. Interestingly enough, I would say it's because Kanan strives to follow the hallmark Jedi principles about emotions - including acting out of love - and using the Force that he is able to avoid attachment.

And so, while I agree with the premise that romantic relationships do not in and of themselves lead to the Dark Side, I think it's also very important to keep in mind what attachment truly is when talking about the Jedi and their beliefs.

Very stupid animation I made based on that 2003 concept art where it says Mikey listens to Jimmy Buffett

The Mutation Situation!

A Mysterious Chemical: Ep. 1, Ep. 2, Ep. 3…

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Updates are every Saturday! :]

I know this is going to make me sound pretensions but I have to get it off my chest. I feel an unimaginable rage when someone posts a photo and is like "this picture looks like a renaissance painting lol" when the photo clearly has the lighting, colors and composition of a baroque or romantic painting. There are differences in these styles and those differences are important and labeling every "classical" looking painting as renaissance is annoying and upsetting to me. And anytime I come across one of those posts I have to put down my phone and go take a walk because they make me so mad

I just discovered foodtimeline.org, which is exactly what it sounds like: centuries worth of information about FOOD.  If you are writing something historical and you want a starting point for figuring out what people should be eating, this might be a good place?

As a child my options were:

archeologist, detective, writer, ballerina, teacher, pirate, superhero (plant powers), cat (just straight up become a cat), and ninja. I had to narrow it down a bit when I got older.

if we lived in a world where u had to do the career u were first interested in as a child what would u be doing, id be a firefighter