also it was important for rose to be able to live out the ultimate female power fantasy, which is freeing something large and majestic and abused, then riding it on a terrifying destructive rampage through the corrupt halls of its captors, then freeing it to go cavort in the wild and be free. just look at how women write horses, and dragons, and wolves. just look at the passionate empathy teenage girls have for chained and wounded beasts.
so, i was extremely fucking delighted that star wars finally had a really specifically, quintessentiallyfemale power fantasy in it for once, instead of just more girls stepping into / reclaiming male power fantasies (and thereby reaffirming the universality of male desires and power structures).
i’m not at all surprised that so many adult men are saying ‘what’s the point of that?’ because they’re not the point of it at all. that part wasn’t written for them. it was for girls. even more than general leia was for girls, the Horse Girl Fantasy Ride was for girls, and i love that, and it was great, the end.
A group of rough looking boys walked past me today and all I heard of their conversation was “he’s got that anxiety disorder bro so I went with him so he’d be more comfortable” and it made me realise the world isn’t all that bad
The pet store I worked at had a pen with rabbits near the front door. On every side of the pen were huge signs saying “You can pet me, but don’t pick me up!” One day two absolutely huge guys came in and one immediately reaches into the pen to grab a rabbit. Before i could say anything his friend grabbed his arm and asked him “did you see the sign?” He said “yeah! it says that you can pick them up but don’t pet them!” Then he went quiet for a moment and softly said “I didn’t read it right did I?” And his friend just puts his arm on his shoulder and said “its ok, i know you’ve got that thing where words get mixed up. Let just pet these cute lil shits” And I still haven’t gotten over that interaction.
I was walking my dog through Boston bc he likes the likes car rides. He’s a little thing tbh we call him short and long. So this huge scary man with a full beard approaches me like “hey can my buddy and I pet your dog? He gets nervous around dogs but your’s is so small I think it’s a good place to start.” Ofc I was like “yes he’s very friendly!” So this guy brings his equally big friend over and they sit on the floor while this man looks terrified of my tiny dog so big man number one asks “can I pick him up?” And i say yes so he picks him up and puts him on man number two’s lap and man number two is abt to freak out and his friend straight up just goes “hey man, it’s okay just relax I’d never let anything hurt you. He’s a good boy.” I’ll never forget it ever bc I know that man looked at me (5’3 , glasses, probably wearing a sweater vest) and my dog (kinda goofy looking little thing) and was like ‘ah yes the two least intimidating living things I’ve seen in Boston all day he’ll feel relaxed around them’ and went out of his way to help his friend. It makes me so happy
modern greek mythology stories i am tired of seeing: gritty, “the gods are dying because we don’t believe in them” stories where the greek gods mingle sadly with mortals and lament their lost power
modern greek mythology stories i would like to see: cerberus manages to escape from the underworld and hades has to find him before he can unleash his rage upon the mortal realm, only to find out that cerberus was found by a child who tamed him by sharing her after-school snack with him and giving him pets, and he now has to figure out a way to sneak into the suburbs and avoid getting the cops called on him while he steals his three-headed hell-hound back from a five year old girl
He was a big dog, but not crazy big. And he was so soft! Her hand sunk into his fur like it was a fuzzy pillow when she went to pet him.
The fact that he had three heads and three sets of sharp teeth didn’t bother her. It was silly. One head licked her face while the others nosed at her pockets for treats.
He was way better than the neighbor’s dog. That one was annoying and small and liked to bite little girls who lost their ball. No, this dog was perfect. This dog was hers.
“Come on, it’s time to go home,” she said. “You can sleep in my bed. But Mommy sneezes around dogs, so we’ll have to be careful.”
The dog yipped excitedly, bounding ahead of her. She noticed a splotch of lighter grey near his butt before he turned around to face her again.
“Spot! That’s a good doggy name. You’ll be my Spot.”
And so she took him home. She pushed him into the backyard so she could go say hi to her mommy like she did every day. The bus stop was at the end of the street, so her mommy said as long as she was really careful she could walk home with the boy next door. She was really, really careful. She was in kindergarten. She was a big kid now.
Spot was digging at the edge of the garden when she went back outside.
“No, Spot! Mommy’s flowers will break!” She hurried after him, ready to play with her new best friend.
—
There. At the edge of town, tucked in a nondescript neighborhood.
What was he doing there? Waiting, no doubt. He had to admit, it was a good location to begin his rampage. Women, children, families – he could create a lot of damage.
He should have been paying more attention. His duties to Olympus took up too much time lately. Persephone did what she could, but it wasn’t always enough. She wasn’t there the whole year, so the poor boy got lonely.
Hades was lord of the underworld; he should have sensed that something was amiss. But no.
No, now he was lurking in the mortal realm, trying to corral a three-headed hellhound and keep him from unleashing his excess energy by destroying a fifty-mile radius.
He blamed Zeus. He just liked to listen to himself speak, the old windbag.
So, he needed to figure out a way to get Cerberus back without alerting anyone. Shouldn’t be too difficult.
—
Why did this shit always seem to happen at the end of a double shift? She just wanted to go home and sleep, but they had one last call to respond to.
A neighbor called in that some asshole was trying to steal a dog. Who even did something like that?
So, Officer Marquez geared up, ready to take out her frustration on this douche (seriously, you don’t steal pets – that should get you thrown in the lowest circle of hell) only to find the weirdest thing she’d ever seen.
“What the fuck?” her partner muttered as they got out of the squad car.
A man stood near the road looking very uncomfortable now that they’d garnered an audience. He was tall, pale, and kind of gangly, but he didn’t look like a wackjob. In fact, he looked like a businessman – freshly pressed suit and everything. Just went to show you couldn’t judge a book by its cover.
An adult woman stood in the middle of the yard, clearly not sure what to do.
Then, there was the little girl who had her arms wrapped around a dog. She was about five, but she had the grip of a sumo wrestler on the poor dog. It was about the size of a Great Dane, maybe a little bigger, a deep charcoal grey, almost black.
But it had three heads. And rows upon rows of teeth. And three lolling tongues that occasionally licked the girl’s face.
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Marquez murmured to her partner as they approached.
“Scooby Doo with three heads? Oh yeah.”
“Good. I was starting to wonder if they laced the coffee or something at the station.” She took a breath before approaching the man while her partner sidled up to the woman to calm her down. “Sir, may I ask what you’re doing here? From all accounts, this is not your residence.”
The man sighed, his shoulders sagging. He seemed kind of harmless, but she wasn’t about to let him off easy. She waited him out. “No, officer, you’re correct. I am only here for the day, but my dog escaped. I am simply trying to retrieve him.”
“No!” the girl yelled. “You can’t take him! I found him! He’s mine!”
Marquez tried to take a quick survey of the situation. The dog seemed perfectly content with the girl, but he kept his gaze trained on the guy. The girl was almost in tears, but, really, she’s five. That could be about anything.
The mother was the wild card.
“Sir, can I just have you wait here for one moment?”
“Of course.”
And he did actually stay there while she walked towards the mother. Amazing.
Her partner excused herself from talking to the mother. “She’s in the dark. She’s never seen the guy or the dog.”
Marquez rolled her eyes. “Got it. Kid finds dog, kid claims dog.” She raised her voice slightly as she turned back to the guy. “Sir, will he come if you call him?”
The man nodded. “Κέρβερος, άγέ.”
Suddenly, the dog was across the yard sitting in front of the man, tail wagging and three tongues lolling. Marquez would have sworn – only under oath and only if asked directly – the Great Dane sized dog was now the size of the house with glowing red eyes and smoke billowing around him. The girl broke out in piercing sobs breaking her concentration. She couldn’t be sure anyone else saw.
“Please don’t take my Spot!”
The guy paused in checking over the dog and looked at the girl. He smiled sweetly at her. His whole demeanor changed, he looked lighter, more sure of himself, and kind of… glowy.
“You named him Spot?”
She sniffled, “It’s a good puppy name. And he’s got the spot on his butt.”
“You are absolutely right,” he chuckled. “I named him Spot too. It’s just in a different language.”
“Really?” The girl’s eyes nearly bugged out of her head. But she’d stopped crying.
“Really. Listen, would you maybe like it if he came to visit sometimes? I work a lot, as does my wife, so sometimes he gets really lonely.”
“Please! Mommy, can he visit? Please, please, please!!”
The poor woman just nodded, but it was clear she had no idea how to process what was going on.
The man smiled. “Perfect. He’ll be thrilled to have a new friend.”
Marquez left with her head spinning. Her and her partner sat in the squad car silently for a minute before driving back to the station.
“Let’s just skip the paperwork on this one.”
–
“And that is why we now have a wall covered in drawings of Cerberus from a five year old,” Hades explained to Persephone.
I needed to tag you all because this is like the cutest thing ever
Now i want a whole series of stories about gods in the mortal realm. Just imagine- Hermes working for Amazon and Mercury working for Fedex so they compete with each other… Zeus gets into the Bachelor show on TV only to get his balls stomped by Hera who turns out to be one of the contestants. Athena being in charge of a special FBI / CIA group that is trying to catch an international crime syndicate led by Loki. Oh, the possibilities 😀
So to explain: It was our first DnD campaign, a lot of us were new to RPGs in general, and so our DM did a short little story so we could see how we liked it. I was a Gnome Bard who loved to joke and my friend was a Half-Elf warlock who was stuck up and not too keen on being in our group. Our DM explained we were in a forest with a town off in the distance and we all decided to go to the town (except for our Half-Orc who said we could all easily sleep in the forest). This was the first official interaction between our characters.
Me: *started singing “We’re following the leader, the leader, the leader” as we start walking towards the town*
Half-Elf: *scoffed* “Do you have to sing?”
Me: *gave Half-Elf an incredulous look and yelled* “I’m a bard!”
Everyone was already laughing and we had a hard time being serious after that.
Glue the spines from an old encyclopedia set to slats of wood, back with
a piece of fabric (a “tambour”) and top with woodscrews as makeshift
rollers that run along a routed track, and voila, you’ve got a hidden
stashbox that slides aside to reveal whatever you want to hide there.
My problem is that if I made this, it would remain a secret for
precisely zero seconds as I excitedly showed it off to everyone who
would come see it, because it is just that cool.
The original project is by Keith Decent, with a great accompanying writeup by Hackaday’s Tom Nardi.
Decent uses “reclaimed” materials (presumably spines from damaged books), but if you’re the kind of ignoramus who likes decorating with wrong-way-round books, you could remove all the spines from your decorative elements and sell them to people making these.
But Thiel’s principled, libertarian commitment to free speech just keeps
on giving: now, he’s submitted a bid to buy the distressed assets of
Gawker, primarily the archives of its reporting, which would let him
flush all their negative stories about him down the memory hole.
A crowdfunded bid to put the Gawker archives under control of former staffers collapsed last week.
Alex Stamos, a computer security and forensics expert, was one of the expert witnesses in US v Swartz, the vindictive case
brought against Aaron Swartz for walking into an unlocked computer
closet, and downloading a large number of academic articles from JSTOR,
using MIT’s network. Stamos has very good perspective on the “crimes”
for which Aaron was being hounded by the state:
* At the time of Aaron’s actions, the JSTOR website allowed an
unlimited number of downloads by anybody on MIT’s 18.x Class-A network.
The JSTOR application lacked even the most basic controls to prevent
what they might consider abusive behavior, such as CAPTCHAs triggered on
multiple downloads, requiring accounts for bulk downloads, or even the
ability to pop a box and warn a repeat downloader.
* Aaron did not “hack” the JSTOR website for all reasonable
definitions of “hack”. Aaron wrote a handful of basic python scripts
that first discovered the URLs of journal articles and then used curl to
request them. Aaron did not use parameter tampering, break a CAPTCHA,
or do anything more complicated than call a basic command line tool that
downloads a file in the same manner as right-clicking and choosing
“Save As” from your favorite browser.
* Aaron did nothing to cover his tracks or hide his activity, as
evidenced by his very verbose .bash_history, his uncleared browser
history and lack of any encryption of the laptop he used to download
these files. Changing one’s MAC address (which the government
inaccurately identified as equivalent to a car’s VIN number) or putting a
mailinator email address into a captured portal are not crimes. If they
were, you could arrest half of the people who have ever used airport
wifi.
* The government provided no evidence that these downloads caused
a negative effect on JSTOR or MIT, except due to silly overreactions
such as turning off all of MIT’s JSTOR access due to downloads from a
pretty easily identified user agent.
* I cannot speak as to the criminal implications of accessing an
unlocked closet on an open campus, one which was also used to store
personal effects by a homeless man. I would note that trespassing
charges were dropped against Aaron and were not part of the Federal
case.
Aaron hanged himself two years, to the day, after his arrest. The DoJ asked for the maximum penalty: 30 years.
When Congress voted last week
to renew the NSA’s controversial Section 702 powers, which gives the
spy agency the power to conduct mass, secret, warrantless surveillance
on Americans, they also voted down a bipartisan amendment that would
have limited the president’s ability to abuse these powers, injecting
the barest minimum of accountability and proportionality into a system
that Republican and Democratic presidents alike have abused for decades.
The amendment was voted down because Democrats didn’t support it. The
same Democrats who show up on the news every night, telling us that
Trump is a dangerous authoritarian who can’t be trusted, just caved to
the “intelligence community” and gave that dangerous authoritarian
virtually unlimited powers to spy on every one of us.
The campaign to sabotage the amendment was led by Democratic Congressjerk Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff,
the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who has
repeatedly claimed that Trump is abusing presidential powers to attack
Trump’s political enemies, including Hillary Clinton. Schiff’s campaign
to ensure that Trump would face no limits or oversight in his spying
power was joined by Nancy Pelosi. 55 Democrats in all ensured that
spying powers were renewed and the amendment was voted down, including
the loathsome poster-child for corruption Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and
Steny Hoyer, the second most senior Democrat in the House.
As Lambert Strether writes on Naked Capitalism: “Watch what they do, not what they say.”
Not all Democratic politicians were so blithe about giving Trump the a
blank surveillance check. Senator Ron Wyden continued his
career-spanning, principled commitment to the Fourth Amendment: “This
Section 702 bill would give AG Jeff Sessions unchecked power to use this
information against Americans. This bill prevents his decisions from
EVER being challenged in court.” And California Democratic Congressman
Ro Khanna wrote, “When @justinamash & @VoteMeadows, chair of the
freedom caucus, vote against surveillance, but scores of Democrats vote
for it, then its fair to ask what does our party stand for? If we can’t
be unified around the principle of civil liberties, then what is the
soul of our party?”
Glenn Greenwald gets the last word: “How can anyone rational possibly
take seriously all the righteous denunciations from people like Pelosi,
Schiff, and Swalwell about how Trump is a lawless, authoritarian tyrant
existentially threatening American democracy when those very same people
just yesterday voted in favor of vesting him the virtually limitless
power to spy on Americans with no warrants or safeguards?”
In addition to ruining regular order in the House, Dennis Hastert was speaker when the impeachment procedure became a purely political and partisan tool. There will always be some political aspect to any impeachment proceeding, there always has been. But never before was it so blatantly political. There was no threat, real or imagined, to our government or to our democracy because Bill Clinton had a sexual affair with a White House intern. Nor did his lie about it within a deposition for a case that was dismissed as without merit, qualify as an egregious case of perjury or obstruction worthy of impeachment.
But so thirsty for partisan scalps were the members of the Republican caucus, so great was their hubris, that they laid claim to this as a high crime and misdemeanor. No matter that so many of them, Bob Livingston, proposed as speaker to replace Gingrich (also an adulterer), Dan Burton, Helen Chenoweth and Henry Hyde, the chief manager of the Senate trial were all guilty of infidelity as well. And Hastert himself knew he was guilty of far greater sexual crimes. But this was their opportunity to destroy a Democratic president and they gladly took it in order to take what they could not win at the ballot box.
However, worse than their attempt to destroy a man, was that their actions severely damaged the impeachment process, making it more difficult to use in the future. Impeachment should be a serious step, taken only in response to the most grave actions by a president that threaten our democracy. The Constitution dictates that it be used only for acts of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” It should never have been used to settle a political score. The result was that a few years later, the threat of this tool could not be used to rein in George Bush’s war-making ability or to prevent his office from further exposing serving CIA operatives. Nancy Pelosi knew her caucus and the nation’s mood when she took impeachment off the table in 2007.
