basshole-astard

[basshole-astard]

Lindt, Mondelēz, and Nestlé together raked in nearly $4 billion in profits from chocolate sales in 2023. Hershey’s confectionary profits totaled $2 billion last year. The four corporations paid out on average 97 percent of their total net profits to shareholders in 2023. The collective fortunes of the Ferrero and Mars families, who own the two biggest private chocolate corporations, surged to $160.9 billion during the same period. This is more than the combined GDPs of Ghana and Ivory Coast, which supply most cocoa beans. Decades of low prices have made farmers poorer and hampered their ability to hire workers or invest in their farms, limiting bean yield. Old cocoa trees are particularly vulnerable to disease and extreme weather. Many farmers are abandoning cocoa for other crops, or selling their land to illegal miners.

#capitalism #well! i hate that!

[basshole-astard]

So, there's a lot of USians around who are very clearly fucking fed up with their political choices this election cycle, and planning to sit it out.

And I get it! What's the point of voting if there's no one to vote for?

The thing is, I'm Australian. In Australia, voting is compulsory. We don't get to sit out our elections, and I'll be real honest with you - we don't exactly get better choices than you lot. So how do you vote if there's no one to vote for? You find someone to vote against. And there's always someone to vote against.

Now, we have the pleasure of preferential voting in Australia - We get to rank every candidate from 1 to X, and I'll tell you, there's something so cathartic about putting the biggest bastard of the lot at the very bottom of your preferences. I understand that USians don't get that option - you get to mark one person, and that's it.

That means that you get one shot, so aim it at the biggest bastard of the lot. The candidate you most utterly detest. Put your vote in the worst possible place for them. Don't even think about who that vote's going towards, that's not the point. Remember, every vote is a vote against someone. Make sure you fuck up that someone's election day!

#uspol #politics #but voting is important yall #i don't care if you don't like your pick #the important thing is that the other guy loses #enemy of my enemy is my friend #etc #also you have to remember that the supreme court #ALSO makes pretty large decisions #that the president sometimes CAN'T STOP THEM FROM DOING #sometimes it is not the president doing hte bad things #sometimes he just can't stop them #.....or sometimes he is doing the bad things #but you have to ask yourself #which would cause the LEAST harm #and vote for that #and you have to remember! despite everthing! #it's basically just gonna be down to two people #so voting someoen who isn't them... is almost the same as throwing away your vote #not in EVERY case #but with presidents? well. #idk if im oversimplifying or anything #but this is what i've leanred about it

[basshole-astard]

Friend of mine was submitting a job application and discovered that they REQUIRED a photo:

We’re trying to decide which of these is a better option:

or

#jobs

[basshole-astard]

#capitalism #housing crisis #BASS BOOST THIS ONE LADS

[basshole-astard]

if yall ever want like serious advice from me about how to solve burnout as a creative it's like...

literally ignore it. stop pushing. go do something else, enjoy your life, fill it with other things, do what brings you joy in the moment if you can.

go to the gym, take a walk to touch grass and look at dogs and smell flowers, cook dinner, watch tv with your friends, talk about your feelings as needed with ppl you trust, take a drive and blast your music, do the chores you need to do, the job hunting slog you need to do, read books that aren't for research, stop cordoning off your brain for The Craft or The Draft or whatever the fuck

forget about the project, stop thinking about it for as long as it takes to be excited again.

fuckin rest, basically

#selfcare #burnout #creativity

[basshole-astard]

No offence but some younger queer people heard "nonbinary is not a third gender" and interpreted that as "no nonbinary person identifies as a third gender".

And some people heard "nonbinary people are outside of the gender binary" and interpreted that as "no nonbinary person identifies as a binary gender. no nonbinary identifies as both 100% a man AND 100% a woman because that's not outside of the binary". (????)

And some younger nonbinary people seem to have internalised "well I'm nonbinary and I don't feel that way so you're wrong", even though the entire point of being nonbinary is that there's literally infinite ways to experience gender.

What I'm trying to say is, there's an identity entirely built around not fitting into narrow boxes, and yet a hefty chunk of our own community seems hellbent on forcing us into boxes anyway.

#queer stuff

[basshole-astard]

I just realized the fundamental disconnect for people who think they can "boycott" voting:

People who threaten to withhold their vote are thinking of the government like a business. If you don't like what a business is doing, you can refuse to shop there, and that hurts them.

But your government is not a business, no matter how much the GOP tries to pretend it is, and refusing to participate doesn't hurt it. If you refuse to vote, you still have to live under that government. I know we're all fundamentally broken by late-stage capitalism, but you get that you can't "Well, you just lost a customer" this one, right? YOU AREN'T A CUSTOMER.

Refusing to vote isn't like refusing to buy McDonald's. It's like walking into a McDonald's, handing the cashier $20 (because you still gotta pay taxes whether you vote or not), and saying "Surprise me."

(Oh and during this particular trip, one of the two McDonald's options is maybe not your favorite food, and the other is deadly poison.)

#voting #uspol

[basshole-astard]

Ending the stigma of drug use will save lives.

#drugs

[basshole-astard]

Do I have anyone who works at walmart or Sam's club following me

#walmart #sure!!!!

[basshole-astard]

When I was in ninth grade I wanted to challenge what I saw as a very stupid dress code policy (not being allowed to wear spikes regardless of the size or sharpness of the spikes). My dad said to me, “What is your objective?”

He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)

I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.

What is your objective?

Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.

I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.

I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.

Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.

Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.

How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?

Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.

Don’t be a dickhead. Be smarter than I was at 14. Ask yourself: what is your objective?

#life advice

[basshole-astard]

personally i think you should be able to afford a place to live with a part-time job

#capitalism #why is it so BAD here

[basshole-astard]

As someone who buys a shit tonne of vintage and retro items all the time I need to tell you about the "shart zone" and "prime nuclear cockroach material"

when buying used items i will do anything in my power to avoid the shart zone, which is in the range of 5-10 years old, this is a short enough amount of time for especially electronic items to have not found a way to fall apart horribly but have become out dated enough to have no support and likely will not retain any value. I do however LOVE the nuclear cockroach material zone which is anything 20+ years old. If it still works after 20 years it is going to work forever. A great example of this is my pc which exists in the shart zone and has to be revved up to turn on lawnmower style, but my N64 works fine.

#I MEAN THEY ALSO DON'T MAKE THEM HOW THEY USED TO #IT'S BOTH BUT #tag later

[basshole-astard]

I'm a law abiding citizen but something about working six times harder than my grandparents for a sixth of what they had is persuasive

#capitalism #augh

[basshole-astard]

I’m running an Introductory Animation Workshop with creative arts students this Saturday (August 20, 2016) for The School of Creative Arts Open Day at Melbourne Polytechnic’s Prahran Campus. I’ve rotoscoped and broken down some of the greatest dance gifs to their basic poses and we’re going to collaboratively design characters then MAKE THEM DANCE!!

Come down, check out the campus and say HI!

I can’t wait to see the weird animated goofs that result from this workshop, I’ll post them in a couple of days so we can all be in awe of their hilarious spontaneity! 

#art ref

[basshole-astard]

Voting Blue in Alabama!

#good news

[basshole-astard]

"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."

Ismatu Gwendolyn, "you've been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress)", from Threadings, on Substack [ID'd]

#books #reading #ref tag

[basshole-astard]

the chocolate trigger thing is a myth??

Thank you for asking. The short of it is yes.

Chocolate as a posited migraine trigger came out of migraine journal studies. Basically, people suffering from migraine were asked to keep detailed journals of their lives, including what they ate, and this was compiled and trends were picked out.

One thing they found? People often ate chocolate before reporting a migraine attack.

There were two things going on here, though it took years for people to come to this conclusion. The first is that migraine prodrome can include sugar cravings-- so people who were already well on their way to a migraine attack were craving chocolate, ate the chocolate, and then reported the migraine. The second is that stress is a trigger of both migraines AND sugar cravings. Thus for someone had a rough week, the stress induced both a migraine attack and a desire for chocolate.

Later lab studies in which people who suffer migraine were given chocolate, or cocoa, or small doses of caffeine similar to what's found in chocolate, etc etc found that there was ZERO evidence for chocolate triggering a migraine. No component of chocolate triggered a migraine in sensitive people, even people who reported chocolate as a trigger.

So really, eating chocolate is a symptom of migraine, not a trigger of it.

These same food diary studies also led scientists to (briefly) believe that alcohol might PREVENT migraines. Why? People who reported fewer migraine attacks drank more alcohol. The actual finding here? People who have more migraine attacks don't frequently drink alcohol because jfc who wants a drink when they have a migraine (also migraine fucks up social lives). Alcohol, unlike chocolate, DOES trigger migraine attacks.

So these are the kinds of limitations of food diaries when you are trying to figure out what triggers your migraine attacks, and also why doctors emphasizing food triggers, especially chocolate, get a side eye from me.

That said, there is ample evidence that when people feel in control of their health, they tend to feel better. If you believe that chocolate triggers migraine attacks and you feel like limiting chocolate helps you, I'm not going to tell you to stop.

But if your doctor handed you a pamphlet with 20 year out of date information on migraines that included the idea that you had to stop eating chocolate and cheese (no evidence for cheese, either, eat your heart out), I'm here to say your doctor is at least 8 years out of date with the literature.

TLDR; chocolate fine, alcohol bad, doctors lazy, science progresses

#migraines #medical #genuinely thank you for the ''however it might still be chocolate if you have MCAS'' addition #we assumed it was the caffiene for my sister esp since soda had the same effect #so. who knows.