I wholeheartedly believe that straight men are envious of gay men and their relative freedom from patriarchal pressures. A gay man can walk into a bar and order a “girly” cocktail if he wants to. He can cry and be outwardly emotional. He can be vulnerable and sensitive. He doesn’t always have to be “in charge.” These pressures slowly crush cishet men and when they see someone free of that weight they feel a deep jealousy.
It occurs to me that this is something homophobia and fatphobia have in common.
So many diet cultists lose their minds when presented with a fat person who isn’t miserable and shame-ridden and celibate. They view thinness as a prerequisite to having basic human dignity, in the same way that homophobes/transphobes view gender conformity as a prerequisite to having basic human dignity.
a martial artist goes in for routine surgery but every time the surgeon tries to make an incision the anesthetized master flawlessly blocks the blade on pure instinct. eventually they have to wake him up and tell him they’ll numb the body part and put it behind a curtain but he has to be awake to avoid blocking. hilarity ensues as evil martial artists invade on the other side of the curtain and our guy just hangs out because he assumes this is how surgery normally sounds, but then they pull the curtain aside expecting him to be an easy target and find him awake and (metaphorically) kicking. cue interestingly choreographed fight sequence as he defeats all of them with only half of his limbs. starring jackie chan and/or stephen chow
if it weren’t for this dang writer’s strike and stephen chow retiring and all of jackie chan’s recent films being bad i would be in the big leagues by now
They’re also shooting for 100% renewable plastic sources by 2030! All of the soft plant/leaf elements in sets right now and going forward are made out of bioplastic made from sugarcane, and they’re working on getting the regular hard plastic bricks out of that, too.
They’ve done it, actually! The full bricks are in the prototype stage now, and are expected to be 100% biodegradable without the need for a commercial compost facility. It’s very cool. Right now they’re testing the durability and playability of the bricks and seeing what needs to be revised/reworked on their final model.
So its that easy huh
Of course it is
Actually, this isn’t “easy” and is huge news. You see, Lego is absolutely meticulous about their quality control. Their standards for manufacturing are stupidly high, as are their safety requirements. You know that distinctive “click” when you pop two Lego bricks apart? They engineered that. That sound is so distinctive that it can be used to tell genuine Lego bricks from counterfeits and it’s a sound that would be based on shape and material.
Furthermore, one of the hard requirements for a Lego brick is that it must be compatible with any other Lego brick. If I buy a set today and pull a set from the 1980s? Those bricks would fit together perfectly. This requires a huge amount of precision engineering and controls on manufacturing quality. (I can’t remember the source, but I’ve at least heard that once the brick molds wear to a certain point, they’re pulled from the line and either melted down or turned into construction material for Lego HQ. Point being, no one is getting their hands on a worn Lego mold)
Recycled and non-petroleum plastics are different from other plastic. The chemistry is different. The timing and process to use them is different. This has been a reason why more companies haven’t moved to them, because there’s a drop in quality for material (so they claim).
What Lego just did is completely obliterate that argument. The corporation with some of the strictest quality control requirements for plastic just kicked the basic foundation of the “bad quality” argument out from under it, because if they feel confident enough to guarantee the same experience as using a brick from over 40 years ago, if they are confident enough that they can meet their own metrics at a huge industrial scale….
A pun post crossed my dash, and I reblogged it with an equally bad pun in return. A couple of my followers find it funny, it’s a good day for everyone.
That was on July 7th.
Virality on Reddit was entirely algorithmic. You could garner a couple crossposts, but the success of a post was entirely dependent on whether or not it hit r/all–the main page of Reddit. If your post does that, it’s immediately exposed to 10x the number of people and immediately gets upvoted.
On my pun post, I get a couple reblogs. And those reblogs get a couple reblogs–nobody really adds any content to the post, it just gets a couple reblogs here and there.
There’s a specific chain of reblogs that I’d like to focus on. The most popular post on this chain has about 25 reblogs on it. Half the posts have three reblogs or fewer. Five posts in this chain have just one reblog total.
But the reblog chain keeps going. And going. It breaches containment many times over. And finally, after a chain THIRTY SIX posts long, at 9:30 AM, July 22nd this morning, it hits a popular account.
ALT
99% percent of the people who have seen the post–virtually unchanged from how it left my dash–have seen it because it was curated by 36 different people. That’s insane to me.
None of those 36 people know that they’re part of this chain. They saw a post, reblogged it, and moved on. If any one of these people had not reblogged, the post would have a fraction of the impact it has.
And yet, after two weeks, the post has effectively hit the main page of tumblr. It was picked up, only because people liked it enough to show it to their followers. There were no algorithms necessary.
You really, truly, cannot get this on any other website.
i can’t get over how evil it is that “gap in your resume” is considered a valid reason to not hire someone like “hmmm sorry you weren’t working constantly every day of your life we need people who do nothing but work until they drop dead for us we just don’t think you’re right for the job” fuck youuuu