toastedsmoreo

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everyone wants to say Democrats don't "message" right but no one wants to admit that GOP messaging is hatred and that is extremely appealing to a lot of people

like they don't want to admit that a lot of people in the United States genuinely love the message of hatred, authoritarianism, and oppression. Fascism is on the rise globally, it's not a uniquely American problem and it's on the rise because people want it. because democracy is grunt work, it's slow, and we live in an instant gratification society that thinks four years is more than enough time to fix and change everything

and it's not

eight years isn't

the kind of change the United States needs is grueling, consistent, constant work, and you can't just flip a "messaging" switch and undo systems of oppression, changing cultural attitudes, educational curricula. It's long term work.

It's like brushing your teeth. Doing it consistently doesn't guarantee you don't have problems, but if you DON'T do it, you'll DEFINITELY HAVE BAD PROBLEMS.

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Little Braixen Academia

(scene from Little Witch Academia, of course)

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imagine making a missing poster for your lost child but in the missing poster you had to include the fact that they fucking eat dirt

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youre not “bad at art” you just need to find a character to latch onto to where you draw them 1 million times and you improve dramatically

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Unreliable narrators are one hell of an idea. You can just write whatever, and if a reader points out "hey the way this scene happened should not be physically possible if it's done the way this character described it", you can just be like "yeah I don't trust that fucker either."

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Mother and child training longsword in Chile, at the Centro Esgrima Histórica

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Dandelion News - June 15-21

Like these weekly compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my Dandelion Doodles!

1. At UN Ocean Conference, Nations and Funders Seek to Create and Expand Large-Scale Marine Protected Areas

“[… W]orld leaders agreed to sweeping but nonbinding commitments[….] Samoa will [protect] a section of the ocean roughly the size of Vietnam[…. Vanuatu] would protect 2 million square miles, an area the size of the Amazon Rainforest [… as] the world’s first multi-national Indigenous-led marine reserve. […] Tanzania will designate reserves to protect seagrass beds and mangrove forests, which serve as natural storm and erosion barriers for its coastal communities.”

2. Australia could host 73GW of solar in abandoned coal mines: study

“[Australia has] 1,470 km² of mine sites potentially supporting some 73 GW of solar in total — and some 2.7GW of coal-to-solar conversions have been announced. […] “Repurposing mines for solar development offers a rare chance to bring together land restoration, local job creation, and clean energy deployment in a single strategy[….]” Green Gravity is testing using mine shafts for gravity based energy storage, and last year secured another $9 million to continue that.”

3. Inside the Veterans Affairs Department’s underground resistance to Trump’s care ban for transgender vets

““I’ve never met a veteran who thought another veteran didn’t deserve care.” […] Despite the risk, all three physicians described a rapidly growing but carefully hidden network of VA staff committed to ensuring that trans veterans still receive care, often through unofficial channels, coded referrals, or creative documentation workarounds[…] and “personal connections,” including community providers and informal care networks.”

4. Native American tribe steps up to protect Florida lands for wildlife

“The [Miccosukee] tribe is looking to buy and protect environmentally significant lands [… as] an ambitious project to connect 18m acres (7.3m hectares) of state and privately owned wilderness into a contiguous, safe habitat for scores of imperilled and roaming species[….] Cypress said the tribe […] already has collaborative or direct stewardship of almost 3m acres in the Everglades and Biscayne national parks, and Loxahatchee national wildlife refuge[….]”

5. More trees, more tools: Uzbekistan steps up on Aral Sea recovery and support for green business

“[Recent] afforestation has reduced dust storms and improved local air and soil conditions. Now, the government is […] focused on biosaline agriculture - using salty water to irrigate crops, climate-resilient farming and sustainable water use [- as well as…] the launch of a national green certification programme, aimed at helping small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) transition to cleaner, more sustainable practices.”

June 8-14 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)

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Fox Photos. Wally's barber shop, St Martin Street has defiant signs outside after losing its windows during the London blitz. 1940s

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then and now (miss version)

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Alright, I think I like tumblr now.

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.

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.

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there are people with genders you will never comprehend and people fucking in ways you will never understand and people making art you just don't get and that shit RULES

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🌟🌙

bg by my friend @/jojobuu on instagram

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It's really funny seeing people think that Miss is short (mostly because I think they're misinterpreting the kids' heights). So here's their canon heights/ages

Aika (15 y/o) 5'2"

Zira (16 y/o) 5'5"

Eclipse (15 y/o) 5'7"

Miss (39 y/o) 5'8"

Lady DeVoid (ageless) 7'3" + some with horns

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Adriana Smith should have been in the national conversation in the way that Teri Schiavo was. Instead, a hospital, who did not have to do any of that, held her body hostage and worsened the family's pain.