While police around the country are raiding campuses and brutalizing student protesters, the authorities are once again trotting out narratives about "outside agitators."
They do this whenever a movement gets out of their control. It is one of the most basic tactics in their playbook, and they employ it indiscriminately.
As we wrote in 2014, during the demonstrations in Ferguson in response to the murder of Michael Brown,
"Rhetoric about 'outside agitators' is a military operation intended to isolate and target an enemy: divide and conquer. The enemy that the authorities are aiming at is predominantly black and brown, but it is not just a specific social body; it is also an aspect of our humanity, a part of all of us. The ultimate goal of the police is not so much to brutalize and pacify specific individuals as it is to extract rebelliousness itself from the social fabric. They seek to externalize agitation, so anyone who stands up for herself will be seen as an outsider."
The modern question of pronoun usages is not just a conversation about self-actualization, it’s a battle about who gets to define language. And, in our contemporary times, if English is meant to maintain its function as a “universal” language, it will have to adapt to function in the more equitable world we are building, not just the colonial one it forged.
Shayla Lawson, "On Them (Amherst, Massachusetts)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir
the most infuriating thing about personal growth is that even if someone else did have the answer you needed and conveyed it to you in a precise and effective matter, it won't make sense until you're ready for it. you could hear it every day of your life and it wouldn't matter a fucking bit until it finally clicks. there's very little you can do to influence when that happens, either
I am slowly losing my mind over the shift towards video as the default media format.
I do not find this to be an efficient way to absorb information. I am bored and distracted by the time the largely unnecessary introduction is over. I can't use ctrl+f to find the specific information I'm looking for. If there are instructions to follow, I don't want to have to constantly pause and back up to the part I need.
Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1
The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.
So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.
So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.
Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.
And the probe is working again.
From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.
I’ll never forget the time I was sitting with this guy, nice kid, didn’t know him well, I think we must have had a bottle of wine or some questionable hashish or something, and in response to an awkward silence I just started talking and ended up going on a long meandering rant about how ugly American robins are. I’m talking a full monologue. I had an intro and conclusion. It was pointlessly vehement. I have never been so mean or loquacious about anything in my life.
Consider my horror when this perfectly nice guy wordlessly lifted his shirt to reveal a full-torso prismacolor tattoo of his spiritual soul animal, the American robin.
39K notes ·
View notes
Statistics
We looked inside some of the posts by
polterbeist
and here's what we found interesting.
Average Info
Notes Per Post
403K
Likes Per Post
226K
Reblog Per Post
177K
Reply Per Post
528
Time Between Posts
4 hours
Number of Posts By Type
Text
16
Photo
1
Explore Tagged Posts
Fun Fact
There are dozens of funny blogs to kill time on Tumblr.