One of the great joys of my adult life has been realizing that I can just pick up a new skill every so often, take a fun little class in it weekly for a year or two, and simply enjoy meeting people and getting medium proficient and not attempting to become professional in it at all!

Delicately dipping a toe into this interview data and listening to myself say things like: "one thing that I found amongst Kazakhstani Russians especially is that they're like oh we're i mean we're Russian but we're not like, we're not RUSSIAN." Which, yeah, I stand by that.

He's electable if we elect him.

@abdulelsayed.bsky.social triumphing over something like $60 million, $32-ish million of it AIPAC money, is not a "narrow" victory, it's a people's earthquake. This kind of spending is oligarchy in action, to smother democracy through its formal channels, and is getting normalized. Still he won.

In other Michigan news, the state looks set to elect it's first transgender lawmaker. Joanna Whaley won her Democratic primary and will compete in November for a state house seat, beating a primary opponent who tried and failed to disqualify her for not running under her deadname

Money out of politics. Money in your pocket. Medicare for All. Michigan... We won. I am so proud to be your Democratic nominee for US Senate. Let's win in November.

So what I'm learning today is that we were ALL traumatized by Ray Bradbury as teenagers.

Absolutely wild that El-Sayed got more votes AND a bigger margin in Gerald Ford’s hometown and former Republican stronghold of Grand Rapids than he did in hippie lefty Ann Arbor. AES +43 in Grand Rapids, +31 in Ann Arbor.

convincing michiganders to get behind aes because his name is abdul THE sayed and it’ll piss off ohioans

i don't like to police genre, but it's not dark academia unless somebody gets squished in one of these bad boys

I presently have 168 tabs open in my main tab group, largely because I decided to open a pile of wikipedia pages about the lore on specific angels you know, as one does

University of Michigan voters have a 100% El-Sayed precinct right now.

borders are violence full stop

open all borders. stop having them be closed 🇺🇦🇱🇹🇵🇸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿@dov.bsky.social · 2w ago

for most of human history that sort of control was impossible, and this was good, because often the only way to escape a tyrant or a shitty landowner was to literally pack your bags and flee as fast as you can. what has been, will be again, and it will be glorious

It was a hell of an experience having to unplanned move back to the US with all the gun violence and terrible healthcare because it's the only place in the world I'm legally allowed to be unemployed. I've been a really privileged migrant, and if it sucks for people like ME?

open all borders. stop having them be closed 🇺🇦🇱🇹🇵🇸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿@dov.bsky.social · 2w ago

the concept of migration control is incredibly historically new and when it is abolished - and it will be abolished, like all unjust laws are - we will look back on it as if it was a complete insanity. what lunatic would say that your life should be restricted to a territory you were born in

Would like some Actual Good News about the environment ?

Joy as Irish bird feared gone forever returns to Cork

Return of the corncrake gives hope for other native species

corkbeo.ie

We're not going to miss out on an opportunity to re-up Hallie Lieberman's classic article, "Selling Sex Toys: Marketing and the Meaning of Vibrators in Early Twentieth-Century America."

Selling Sex Toys: Marketing and the Meaning of Vibrators in Early Twentieth-Century America | Enterprise & Society | Cambridge Core

Selling Sex Toys: Marketing and the Meaning of Vibrators in Early Twentieth-Century America - Volume 17 Issue 2

cambridge.org

Coreen McGuire@coreenanne.bsky.social · 2d ago

Vibrators! Telephones! Embodied knowledge! Hand transplants! Gender historiography!

Has anyone made a search engine that ONLY searches Reddit + Reddit alternatives like Lemmy? And forums? I would use that so much.

please let my cry my champagne tears about the botox headache I currently have

Ancient little guys of the day! These prehistoric baby bottles in the shape of little creatures were found were found in Bronze and Iron Age graves in Vösendorf (Austria). Actually, a study was conducted on these bottles around 2019 and they found traces of ruminant milk!

There needs to be a secular equivalent to monastic life because I think a lot of people would be happier with marital and procreative expectations just taken off the table for them. Like so many people would really benefit from just becoming nuns or monks or nunks and retiring from worldly fuckery.

Someone should let me write a relationship column for straight people where I tell them that this is actually bad and that our romance-obsessed culture torments us all.

Chef Kennedy🐸🏳️‍🌈@kennedytcooper.bsky.social · 5d ago

Every relationship advice column for straight people: "You're gonna hate your partner, you're gonna find them annoying all the time, you're going to have vivid fantasies about killing them. This is good. This is normal."

Please have a charming story about goodness in the world.

Gail Simone@gailsimone.bsky.social · 2d ago

So, here's a thing. I met this wonderful lady, @thehappysorceress.bsky.social, at a convention in Asheville, NC, near the start of my comics career. Every year since then, she has sent a box of home-made treats on my Birthday and at Christmas. Every year for SIXTEEN YEARS. 1/

In Astana we had to show IDs to armed police to go to the grocery store. Not saying that was awesome or anything but that no one in North America knows what that was like or can even imagine it.

Dr. Lucky Tran@luckytran.com · 6d ago

People still complain about “lockdowns” but we had none in the US. We had stay-at-home orders, where although businesses were closed, you could still go outside whenever you wanted. Other countries had far stricter rules, and yet have been much more accepting of them as they saved many more lives.

Downplay a book or movie: Disquiet and Displeasure in Reno

Q. Pheevr@q.pheevr.ca · 3d ago

Downplay a book or movie: I Capture the Bishop

acab all cats are babies and abac all babies are cute

Moving to Kazakhstan taught me that a lot of men in Turkophone spaces are named the equivalent of Leo or Lev, which is Aslan. So CS Lewis just named his God-Lion, Lion. I will never be over this.

Beau@drbeaubeaumont.bsky.social · 3d ago

A friend and I used to sit at the desks in the Bodleian Library that we were told were the ones that Lewis and Tolkien preferred; and every so often one of us would whisper “God is a wizard!”, and the other would hiss back “God is a lion!”, and then we’d knock it on the head and go to the pub.

A friend and I used to sit at the desks in the Bodleian Library that we were told were the ones that Lewis and Tolkien preferred; and every so often one of us would whisper “God is a wizard!”, and the other would hiss back “God is a lion!”, and then we’d knock it on the head and go to the pub.

Evan Bernick, a finite mode with a smol hooman and a lorg floof@evanbernick.bsky.social · 3d ago

Just because

I am 100% in favour of sortition for all university leadership roles. Everyone has a stake, everyone is fundamentally equal and anyone should be able to stand up and do the job for a couple of years.

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes.bsky.social · 4d ago

My crank beliefs here are 1) wanting the job should be immediately disqualifying and 2) try sortition. Not sure we could do worse by letting a random number generator loose on the faculty register...

My crank beliefs here are 1) wanting the job should be immediately disqualifying and 2) try sortition. Not sure we could do worse by letting a random number generator loose on the faculty register...