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This thread omg

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The weirdest guy I ever met in a church was this boy who referred to “Buzz Aldrin and his husband” going to the moon. I was completely baffled, and when I asked if he’d misspoken, he got really angry and accused me of being deliberately ignorant of the facts. It turned out that he was somehow comvinced that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were married. It took five Wikipedia articles to convince him otherwise.

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My latest cartoon for New Scientist

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With a good battery, the device can easily last for 5 or 10 years, although the walls probably won't.

Alert Sound [Explained]

Transcript

[A loud sound appears out of nowhere in the upper left part of the panel, around the word are many small lines going away from it and before the word there is a warning emoji. In the lower right corner Cueball is sitting in an office chair at his desk in front of his computer. He is holding his hands to his head and begins by shouting and then talking.] ⚠ Boop! Cueball: Aaaaa! Cueball: I heard it again! Cueball: Where is that coming from!?

[Caption below the panel:] It turns out living well is only the second best revenge. The best revenge is making a tiny hole in someone's wall and dropping in a battery-powered capsule that, every 6-12 hours, plays the alert sound of a USB device connecting.

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Concept: formalwear for wizards in the mode of 17th Century continental European court fashion, except instead of powdered horsehair wigs it involves elaborately curled and pomaded false beards. The best quality ones are fastened to a shoulder harness because the neck can't take the weight.

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Concept: formalwear for wizards in the mode of 17th Century continental European court fashion, except instead of powdered horsehair wigs it involves elaborately curled and pomaded false beards. The best quality ones are fastened to a shoulder harness because the neck can't take the weight.

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helen “trans people are perpetuating gender steriotypes” joyce is now upset that the scientific american is writing about how women were hunters too back in the day, not just mothers and caretakers. feminist win!

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reblog if your name isn't Amanda.

2,121,566 people are not Amanda and counting!

We’ll find you Amanda.

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LGBT (labrador, greyhound, beagle, terrier)

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Fantasy writers should be more anthropology brained. More theology brained. More wacky intellectual history brained. You should be giving out interesting and novel but believable social structures. Oh they don't have monogamy they have some other thing and they're just as violent about it? Perfect. There should be religions that aren't just gods of x y z. Folio gods are out! And the theology shouldn't fall apart from a moderately intelligent person thinking about it for 4 seconds. Of it falls apart in five econds that's fine. Like just crazy enough to think that a real human society could get down with it. There should be like bizarre new architecture that ye oldifies modernist movements. Oh amd the thing where every city and region is somehow completely homogenous is crazy; do something else. Put people living together with a complicated history. Oh and you can just give them a completely different conceptual scheme for talking about gay and trans people. That would be fun. I should be saying "I never thought of it that way." Make up norms and then think what are all the ways in which this can go wrong. Tell me how people disagree on the interpretation of some doctrine. Create a parodying spectre of some constitutional arrangement. Go crazy

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Sometimes I just wish I could-

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Don’t invite me anywhere last minute I enjoy doing nothing so I need to know ahead of time if my plan to do nothing needs to be changed

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The problem with a lot of attempts to create federated social media platforms is that they talk about building decentralised communities, then turn around and adopt models of social media which are, at a structural and intentional level, hostile to both decentralisation and community-building.

They're caught in this horrible trap where they have to make it work like X/Twitter to leverage people's existing familiarity, but the X/Twitter model by design fosters "communities" consisting of large audiences of passive content consumers whose participation is oriented around following a tiny core of mega-popular content producers, which is fundamentally opposed literally all of their stated goals. It's great for monetisation, of course, but if advertiser-driven monetisation isn't part of our game plan, what the fuck are we even doing here?

You know why it's so hard to find a satisfactory alternative to something like Tumblr? A big part of it is because Tumblr is one of the only major social media platforms that isn't structurally hostile to people just talking to one another.

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Cis people insisting that there's an age limit to not being shitty about trans people or that you can't make not-shitty trans jokes? Take notes.

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My dad was eating pistachios so I reached my hand out and he just started peeling them and giving them to me. Then suddenly went “I really hope you find someone who loves you a lot” and I went “enough to peel my pistachios for me?” And he laughed and said “yeah exactly” before carrying on giving me more