Ironically, after working in production for over a decade, I’m hoping to go back to school for business management. Because it turns out that there’s zero career track and advancement potential if I stick with what I already know. Depressing shit.

If I drop that name, that gives people enough to figure out which school I went to, what years, and they can correlate that with my post history to figure out exactly who I am IRL.

I’ve probably posted enough already that someone with a large enough database could do that already, but dropping names would make it much easier for just about any schmuck with an internet connection and decent search skill.

(And believe me, I would love to tell people the name of the pretentious dick that was the head of the department, but… Aaargh.)

I went to school for fashion design. (Hence interacting with a famous designer in school. Come to think of it, the head of the department at the time was someone with a significant international reputation. And I still think he’s a pretentious dick.) These days I do industrial print media, because I burned out hard in school, due to a combination of raging, untreated ADHD and 48+ hour days working in studio.

I would not recommend fashion design to anyone that has any interest in a healthy work/life balance, and fast fashion has absolutely gutted anything domestic that’s of any interest at all.

I… Can’t do that without giving away far too much personal information. Unfortunately.

Fundraiser at a very expensive art school. I was a scholarship student at a cocktail mixer, and I was at the mixer because it was being held in the department I was majoring in. All of the people that were attending were fine arts patrons, the kind of people that drop tens of thousands on art without thinking twice about it. I was–literally–a punk kid with tattoos and shit tons of piercings, and I was supposed to be pleasant to people with millions more than I’ll ever have.

Got to piss off a world famous fashion designer that evening, so that was cool.

TLA agencies would have no problem with a cover identity to “prove” who they are. Your average citizen is going to have a hard time buying a slightly used social security number that they can use to get an ID that will pass KYC laws.

He is punching down and attacking a group of people who are suffering in “the new world” just like him, and a fucking bag of cookies is one of the few joys they can still aquire.

I know a lot of people that are quite overall politically liberal that feel this way. I know a lot of people that get upset at the idea of inmates being given “free” educations in prison because they still have student loans 20 years after school. People that support the ideas of helping people up, that are fully on board with LGBTQ+ rights across the board, think DEI is a good idea, think it’s critical that women have bodily autonomy, and so on, but still have a knee-jerk reaction to things that they don’t fully get, or haven’t had explained to them.

I don’t know if he meant the song that way, or what. I do know that the people coming into the White House in a few months aren’t likely to make things any better for people like him. Or people like you. Or people like me.

If you know anything about the history of punk music and east coast hardcore, Ian MacKaye was clearly one of the most principled people in the scene, and a genuinely good and decent person. So it’s really weird to hear that people ever got the weird idea that he was pro-racism or something.

Then again, The Dead Kennedys had to make “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” because they were sick of their shows being infiltrated by the wrong kind of skinheads.

An old soul in a new world… Dude the south lost and slavery is bad. I’m sorry

I think that’s an uncharitable reading. Which is understandable, but still.

I think that there are a lot of people–myself included–that would like to be able to make a living doing something that seems to matter, or where you make something. Like, factory work sucks in most ways, but it still feels like you’re doing something. Spreadsheets and order projections? Staring at a screen all day, sending polite emails to people you’ll never meet about ways to spend a lot of money electronically?

This “new world” of work and socializing ain’t great. I think it snuck up on a lot of people, and now a lot of people are feeling like they don’t know how to navigate the new reality of depersonalization.

Here’s another song that explicitly references it. Better song too, IMO.

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I’ll keep that in mind. I live at a high enough altitude that I’m literally in the clouds pretty often (e.g., when it’s overcast everywhere else, I’m in pea-soup fog), so cedar is one of the prime choices for anything that’s going to be outside, just to keep it from rotting.

Sadly: no attic. I need try making an attractive bat roost for them. I wonder how bats feel about cedar, since cedar is rot resistant?

If I remember correctly, Republicans in Georgia have consolidated voting locations in Atlanta–which is heavily Democratic–despite there being long line and hours of waiting in 2020. Is it intentional? 100%. In the rural parts of Georgia–and I’m pretty rural–you’re in and out in only slightly longer than it takes to read the ballot.

About 45 minutes, as I recall, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I think that was the year that marriage equality (e.g., gay marriage) was on the ballot in Michigan. (I just looked it up; it was a vote to amend the state constitution to ban civil unions and marriage equality.) That was in 2004. Since then, I don’t remember ever having to wait more than 10 minutes when voting in person.

I love seeing the bats coming out at night in the summer; I can see them in the front clearing, swooping around after moths. I’ve got a bat house, but I think that it’s been vacant for years; I need to find a better way to attract them to my home.

Ooooo! Can I play?

Let’s say that you have a pro-genocide Republican, a pro-genocide Democrat, and an anti-genocide 3rd party candidate, but the anti-genocide candidate also wants to give all school children machine guns and grenades, and require cars to intentionally run down pedestrians?

Or or or let’s say that the anti-genocide candidate’s campaign is so bad that her own party is telling her drop out? .

This is absolutely the case. The black that is usually printed by ink jet printers on paper is about 75% cyan, 70% magenta, 70% yellow, and 90% black. Those percentages are in relation to the maximum output per head. If you are running all your printing through some form of RIP software where you can directly control ink volume, you’ll very quickly see that using only black ink gives you very poor color.

And, fun fact, this is true with black and white photos as well. If you force your printer to use only black ink, you’ll get washed out images with poor contrast. I found this out because the printer and RIP that I operate will default to black ink only when an image is specified as greyscale, and I was getting terrible images. Saving the images in RGB (note: RGB ends up printing with a slightly wider gamut than CMYK) completely solved the issue.

Republicans need young men to turn out; from what I can see, they are trending conservative. They don’t want young women to turn out, because they are trending overwhelmingly liberal.

What exactly are the “material conditions leading to gun crime”?

Largely economic and educational, yeah, but also systemic racism and ingrained misogyny. While it’s facile–and accurate–to say that Republicans block efforts that would help these problems, the fact is that Democrats often do as well, opting to ban firearms and features rather than addressing root causes. I recall one particular violence intervention program that got cancelled in Chicago by–IIRC–Rahm Emmanuel. And unfortunately, many of the centrist Dems don’t really believe in programs that work, like enrolling inmates in college to reduce recidivism.

Why do other countries thar have lots of guns have less gun crime?

Other countries with a relatively high number of firearms also tend to have significantly better social welfare systems, more focus on rehabilitation than punishment in their criminal justice systems, and a lower rate of income inequality overall. If the US had, for instance, the social conditions of Finland, while still having the same number of firearms, I expect that you would see a sharply lower rate of firearm homicides. (Interestingly, Finland has very similar rates of suicide as we have in the US overall. I’m not sure what to make of that. But I also note that all of the Nordic countries seem to have fairly high suicide rates, and all of the Mediterranean countries tend to have quite low suicide rates. Climate and amount of sunlight, maybe?)

Aside from the, the right to keep and bear arms is an individual civil right. IMO, attempts to restrict that right should be subject to strict scrutiny. NYSPRA v. Bruen helped with that, but it hasn’t gone far enough. Think of it this way: voting is supposed to be a right. Republicans want to limit the ability to vote in ways that favor them. I would say that this is wrong, and that Republicans need to change the way that they govern or message so that they can attract more voters, rather than trying to make it harder to exercise a civil right.

or the gas station clerk to get a gun pointed at her and told to give up the cash.

…Which you aren’t very likely to do once economic conditions have been addressed. Not very many people go out and rob people for the sheer joy of it. Little Johnny shoots Susie because society has taught him that the only acceptable emotion is rage, and he can’t deal with his emotions in any other way. Again: address the messaging–about gender norms and expression in this case-- and fix the underlying problems, and then access to the tools of violence becomes immaterial because there’s no longer the impetus towards violence. Dems have made some inroads regarding gendered emotional expressions, but a lot of far-right influencers are actively working against those efforts.

parents of shooters bought them guns despite clear warnings

I think that this is probably appropriate in limited cases, such as with the Crumbleys in Detroit, MI, and with the Grays in Winder, GA. In both cases, the parents (father, in the case of Mr. Gray) had credible information from authorities that their child was at risk of harming other people, and both of them gave firearms to their child despite and after receiving the credible information about them being a risk. I would say that, if parents made a reasonable attempt to deny a child access to firearms, or did not have credible information about their child being a risk, then you should no longer be looking at a criminal or civil case. It seems to me that having your firearms locked inside your home or vehicle should be enough to say that you made a reasonable effort, because anyone that takes a firearm from those places knows that they’re breaking and entering already.

The desire to make locking firearms up is yet another way of making firearms prohibitively expensive, and functionally denies the right to keep and bear arms to people that can’t pony up the $1000+ for a locking firearms container that’s even slightly secure.