[Image descriptions: 1. Tweet by AJ+ @AJPlus [gold check verified] that says: Spain became the 1st country in Europe to offer paid menstrual leave, for 3-5 days. It also gave final approval to laws that: [bullet point] enshrine rights to abortion for people over 16 [bullet point] let trans people over 16 self-identify gender by simple declaration, one of the only places to do so [Attached to the Tweet is a photo of a group of people with trans flags gathered on the steps of a building with large stone columns.]
2. A headline from DW that says: “Spain passes laws on trans rights, abortion, menstrual leave – DW.” The visible part of the article says, “The new laws expand transgender rights and abortion access, as well as give workers paid menstrual leave. The approval comes ahead of…” \End descriptions]
It didn’t get talked about that much, but one of the things the railroad workers were demanding was that they reinstate an old rule that there have to be at least two engineers in the locomotive at all times, in case one falls asleep or has some kind of emergency. Because that’s often the cause of these type of crashes! Some railroad worker’s been awake for 22 hours, staring at nothing but landscape for the last four hours, he falls asleep and there’s no one around to wake him up.
Building a treehouse is the biggest insult to a tree. “I killed your friend, here hold him.”
“Friend”
Its more of I killed a potential enemy. Hold his dismembered corpse in victory.
Plants don’t wage war
Ever heard of blackberries?
Yes, plants do wage war
Mint and strawberries, too. They need to be quarantined or they will kill basically everything else.
I planted mint in the ground 2 years ago.
It’s currently fighting a bitter battle to the death against the raspberries attempting to invade from the east while trying to annex the patio.
Could go either way at this point TBH. Unless, of course, I take a shovel and the blowtorch out there and battle both back to within their original boundaries.
And anyone wondering if a blowtorch is overkill for weeding back mint has never actually planted mint.
This post did not go where I expected it to.
Our garden plot at my childhood home slowly got overrun by wild blackberries after we stopped managing it while my sister and I were in nursing school. And by overrun I mean it was like a 4 foot tall thicket of wild blackberries. It hadn’t been touched by humans in at least 4 years. I started the ultimately futile task of trying to clear this plot with a machete and discovered to my amazement a patch of mint several feet across underneath the canopy of blackberry, still fighting the good fight all those years later.
Ultimately it took two jars of homemade napalm and some creative fire placement to clear that patch but I damn sure saved that patch of mint. It earned the right to be there.
Yall mother fuckers don’t even talk unless you’ve had to wage war on kudzu (it’s an ivy strain directly from Hell) that shit doesn’t just wage war with other plants, it wages war with all living things on planet earth. It’s some gnarly ass Blood for the Blood God, Chlorophyll for the Chlorophyll Throne demon weed.
Can second the comments of Kudzu.
I forget where I read it but there’s this one tree that creates an extremely flammable substance that’s in both the bark and leaves. Dead trees become torches and crushed up leaves become dust-incendiary, all while the plant’s seeds are Giant Redwood levels of resilient to open flame. IE it has a goddamn scorched earth policy. It’s even more badass than plants that use toxins to starve other plants.
I’d like to third the comments on Kudzu. These are the battlefields:
See those weird pillars? Those were trees. See that strange lump in the middle? That was a house. Everything green you see in this photo is kudzu.
Kudzu is an apocalyptic nightmare
They smother every other living plant to death
Those trees under there are dead, they can’t get sunlight. Kudzu takes over and steals everything from these trees, and becomes them. It’s creepy as hell. These plants are basically straight out of a horror novelist’s wet dream tbh.
The bodies of everything the kudzu has slain.
What used to be a house
Someone attempting to drive a four wheeler through it, to give you scale
It’s an ornamental plant kept in check in china, but was introduced to north america where it immediately went rampant and began to spread incredibly fast like a disease, destroying everything in its wake
The ONLY thing that has stopped this curse from engulfing the united states is goats. Apparently goats love this stuff like no tomorrow. Everywhere we find it now, we just bring a horde of goats to cut it down. Everything is fine…. for now.
Kudzu is on time magazine’s top 10 invasive species to look out for.
This little buddy doing his part
Not to keep spamming this post but
“the growth of kudzu as it became a “structural parasite” of the South,[7] enveloping entire structures when untreated[11] and often referred to as “the vine that ate the South”.[13]”
“It has been spreading rapidly in the southern U.S., “easily outpacing the use of herbicide spraying and mowing, as well increasing the costs of these controls by $6 million annually”.[2]“
yall it’s been estimated this plant consumes 600 kilometers of the united states every year
it’s been suggested that we just start eating it to make it go away
Adding to the spam: yes, kudzu IS edible. In fact, all parts of it but the vine are edible. The leaves are supposedly great in salads or baked into quiche. The flowers supposedly are great in jam. The roots… Well, if you know how to cook other root vegetables, you know what to do with kudzu root. Feed this stuff to your livestock and cook it.
You’ve been dropped at the very beginning of the Clone Wars. You can tell ONE PERSON that Palpatine is the Sith Lord. That person will be able to ACT on the information but will not be able to PASS ON this information. WHO DO YOU TELL?
Please explain your reasoning in the tags and may the Force be with you.
HERE’S why I voted Artoo.
R2-D2 is an unstoppable Swiss-knife/action hero/killing machine just waiting to be unleashed.
In George’s words:
“[R2 is] the stalwart unsung hero of the Star Wars films.”
His emotions can’t be sensed, he is the messenger of the Keeper of the Whills, you tell R2 Palpatine is Darth Sidious and a week from then Palps will have THE most unlucky day of his life.
I’m talking he steps on an elevator, and nothing is there, he plummets to his death like in a Looney Tunes episode.
But hey, he’s Darth Sidious, maybe he manages to levitate himself before he hits the ground and goes splat. He looks up at the elevator which is weirdly going up instead of going down. Hm. Strange.
He goes to the Senate, his podium lifts up into the arena only for a MASSIVE holo-recording to start playing in the Senate rotunda of Palpatine putting a hood on in The Works’ changing rooms, then meeting with Dooku.
General chaos. But hey, he’s Palpatine, he has a way to spin this, “he had a secret meeting with Dooku to negotiate peace”, of course, because all that matters is ending this godforsaken war-oooaaaahhh!
The Chancellor’s podium DARTS up towards the ceiling at full speed! “System malfunction” says Mas Amedda, “we’re not sure what’s going on!” Seconds before the podium can explode, Palpatine jumps off and lands unscathed, but feigns an injury.
He gets rushed to an infirmary, and is now lying in a hospital bed wandering WTF is going on today?! Is it Tyranus? Has that octogenarian fuck finally decided to step up and become the Sith Master? Tell you what, he knew his apprentice was sneaky but to sink to this level of–
– RIIIIIIIIING! Fire alarm goes off, as do the sprinklers. But they’re not sprinkling water, they’re sprinkling GASOLINE!
R2 SMASHES through the window screaming a primal war cry:
Don’t fuck with Artoo
And as he sets the whole room on fire, Palpatine’s last thoughts are “what in the space fu–” and dies.
THAT’S why you tell Artoo and not someone like Yoda.
Artoo has that unhinged maverick energy. He’s just waiting for the opportunity to do some damage.
It doesn’t matter if he’s outgunned.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a Sith Lord.
He’s on a mission from the gods and the plot armor wears him, not the other way round.
i would tell artoo because he never tells anyone anything anyway, so being forbidden from doing so wouldn’t inherently nerf his subsequent plans
As I saw someone on here say, Artoo has two settings. He is either your best friend (whether you want to be or not, Threepio) or your worst enemy. He can and has killed people. He’s had zero memory wipes ever, so his personality is basically a peoples.
“I am not interested in dry economic socialism. We are fighting against misery, but we are also fighting against alienation. One of the fundamental objectives of Marxism is to remove interest, the factor of individual interest, and gain, from people’s psychological motivations. Marx was preoccupied both with economic factors and with their repercussions on the spirit. If communism isn’t interested in this too, it may be a method of distributing goods, but it will never be a revolutionary way of life.” - Che Guevara, As quoted in The Many Faces of Socialism Comparative Sociology and Politics (1983) by Paul Hollander, p. 224
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone talk about this at all on Tumblr, which is very lax of us all, so I suppose I shall do it myself.
Last week Elon Musk broke European law so badly that the lawyers who will finally put the case to rest have yet to be born.
I’m not exaggerating. Here’s the thing: America has terrible data privacy laws. A solid technique for an American website owner in times of financial hardship, such as accidentally buying a loss-leading debt-ridden social media platform to avoid going to gaol, is to take all the data harvested from users and to sell it to third parties for lots of money. It is fun and breezy and lets you pay off at least one lawyer for the month. What a lark.
However, the European Union has an even more fun and breezy law called GDPR.
And the thing is, the EU really, really care about GDPR. Like… they really care. This is not one of those grey area laws like jaywalking where it’s basically ignored unless you do it in front of a police officer who is having a midlife crisis because his wife left him and the dishes are piling up and he’s down to his third day of wearing the same pants and yesterday a man in the pub laughed at him for getting a football term wrong. This is the sort of law that, if you break it, grey men in grey suits with worryingly little humour will get in touch and unroll terrifyingly long scrolls of legal text and then you are in gaol for the rest of your life. This is a big law. The big one. Big boy law. Do not break.
So, if you’re going to be a website owner in times of financial hardship who needs some quick money to cover your many billions of dollars of debt who decides to sell the private data you harvested from the user base, the most important thing you absolutely MUST remember is, you can only use the American data,and never the European.
But.
I mean.
Hypothetically.
If someone were to own an American website in times of financial hardship, such as an accidentally bought loss-leading debt-ridden social media platform to avoid going to gaol… but that someone didn’t know the difference between American and European law.
Well then. That person would sell the wrong data.
And if that were to happen, on the scale of a global social media platform, with users ranging from the megalomaniacal Uber Rich to literal world governments…
The ensuing court cases would last for decades, as lawyers began the lawsuits at the richest end of the list, and worked their way down.
***
Also he posted a Twitter poll today about whether he should stay in charge of Twitter and he lost lol
Avatar AU where Aang stays in the iceberg and Katara is mistakenly believed to be the Avatar after she “earthbends” a rock by moving the ice inside it.
Instead of telling the truth and letting everyone down, she and Sokka pull on an elaborate charade and go on a journey to convince the world that the Avatar is back.
Sokka was initially against the idea, thinking it’s crazy, but he got onboard anyway because it’s his little sister and he can’t let her go out into the world alone and put a target on herself.
After they started, he got super into the idea and started crafting an elaborate backstory for her Airbending predecessor, and devising ways for her to fake-bend the other elements.
The Road to Ba Sing Se. I love it.
Bumi agrees to teach her because he is pretty sure she’s a reincarnation of him
Sokka: But… you’re still alive.
Bumi: So is the real Avatar. I think we can bend the rules of reincarnation a bit.
Zuko still gets a redemption arc and switches sides. Only after he joins Team Avatar does he learn that Katara is not, in fact, the avatar. By this point he’s already committed so screw it he’s teaching a waterbender how to fake-firebend now.
That’s very in-character because Aang never wanted to be the Avatar anyway.
Sokka after learning the real Avatar was 20 minutes from his home village the whole time:
She respects Katara a lot more as a fake Avatar than she did when when she thought she was the real one (which is none).
Lots of confusion when Korra pops up and folks are confused as to why water got two Avatars in a row. Which just makes Team Katara giggle.
