alarajrogers

[alarajrogers]

I'm a short woman. I used to be cute. This is deeply personally offensive to me.

Adult women are not children. We do not need to live our lives in fear that someone seeing us being sexual will be attracted to children as a result. People are either attracted to children or they're not, no one becomes a pedophile based on attraction to adults. And if a pedophile was attracted to an adult woman, great! You've just given that pedophile a way to satisfy their sexual desires consensually and without harming any children! That's a fucking win, assholes.

This is a form of misogyny. Women are, statistically, more neotenous than men. That means more of us look more childlike than most men do. This has absolutely nothing to do with our status as adults -- we actually mature faster than men on average. People accusing adult women of somehow encouraging pedophilia by being sexy while short and childlike-looking are committing a form of misogyny. They need to be told so, and told off. Fuck those guys.

Perhaps it's just because I'm a short woman who happens to enjoy both frilly dresses and sex, but I get so mad when people say Ariana grande or Sabrina carpenter are encouraging pedos by uh .... being short, enjoying cute things, and enjoying sex. I'm sorry some adult women are very cute and hot and like sex. And it literally has nothing to do with children. The people accusing them of being creeps are the ones inserting children into the discussion at all. (hyumjim voice) And I'm NOT supposed to be creeped out by that???

[alarajrogers]

None of the above, I am a wizard girl

[alarajrogers]

I feel like self hosted AIs are gonna be the next big thing. Not necessarily generative LLMs, but things like Alexa, except it's yours, it doesn't report to a corporate master, and it's secure because nobody built webhooks into it to let someone walk in the front door, which is going to be true of any cloud product because they all have to phone home.

We've all learned the cloud can't be trusted, not because there's something massively inherently insecure about Internet hosting, but because all companies with cloud services are bastards (and if they're not, just watch what happens when they get successful.) Who wants to trust big corporations anymore? Not me.

Anyway, there is software that lets you break DRM on DVDs enough that you can rip copies of media that is physical. If you buy your physical media you do not need to deal with the inconvenience of "I gotta have a DVD player hooked to my television or PC" as long as you have one DVD player hooked to a moderately powerful machine somewhere in your house that can do the rips.

Hey, look at me. Look at me. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: you need to condition yourself to being okay with being inconvenienced by things. The first time I spoke about this I meant it in a mental health way- it is good to go out to the store and see people versus just ordering alone at home- but there is another more pressing societal issue you should be more concerned about as well.

Any service you rely on for convenience can be weaponized against you the moment you begin to rely on it. Streaming used to be a cheap and convenient way to see movies at home. It is now exorbitantly expensive, you need multiple accounts just to get what you want, and any of those movies can be taken from you at any time. And unless you have gotten used to going through the “inconvenience” of owning physical media, you can do nothing about it. Same goes for buying things on Amazon. Same goes for any service like DoorDash etc. These companies WANT you to be reliant on them for convenience so they can do whatever they want to you because, well, what else are you gonna do?

Same thing goes for the uptick in AI. If you train yourself to become reliant on AI for doing basic things, you will be taken advantage of. It is only a matter of a couple years before there are no free AI services. Not only that, but in the usage of AI’s case, it is robbing you of valuable skills that you need to curate that you will be helpless without the moment the AI companies drive in the knife the way they have done with streaming. Delivery. Cable. Internet. Etc. It will happen to AI too. And if you are not practicing skills such as. Writing. You are not only going to be at the mercy of AI companies in the digital world, but you are going to be extremely easy to take advantage of in real life too.

I am begging you to let go of learned helplessness. I am begging you to stop letting these companies TEACH you helplessness. Do something like learn to pirate. It is way more inconvenient at the beginning, but once you know how, it is one less way companies can take advantage of you. Garden. Go to the thrift store (older clothes hold up better anyway). These things take more time and effort, yes, but using time and effort are muscles you need to stretch to keep yourself from being flattened under the weight of our capitalist hellscape.

Inconvenience yourself. Please. Start with only the ways you are able. Do a little bit at a time. But do something.

[alarajrogers]

Vegan burgers aren't made from ground meat, but they're made from a processed mix of vegetables and fungi that is then a mush which can be shaped into a patty and grilled. Nobody just slaps a piece of tofu down on the buns and says "There we go, tofu burger!" (They may try to do this with a portabello mushroom, but that's also wrong. You can make a mushroom burger by making a gloppy mush of tiny chopped mushrooms and some kind of binding agent and making a patty and grilling or frying it, but just grilling a big mushroom and putting it on a bun doesn't make it a vegan burger.)

[alarajrogers]

#american here. that is a fucking burger. its called a chicken burger

Hard disagree, my fellow American. That is a chicken patty with pickles on a bun. Burgers are made with ground meat. You want a chicken burger, make a patty out of ground chicken, and grill or fry it. You can't just make any old thing into a burger by putting it on a burger bun, or you could, like, put nothing but lettuce there and call it a lettuce burger, or just slather a lot of mayo and call it a mayoburger, or maybe cover it with ice cream and call it an ice cream burger. (I do actually think you could have an ice cream burger because ice cream can parody savory foods, but not by putting ice cream on a burger bun.)

[alarajrogers]

The past was a place like this one. Some aspects of it were great, better than now, and some aspects of it were shitty, worse than now, and some aspects haven't significantly changed. Or they were shitty but it's gotten shittier, or they were good but it's gotten better.

Like, yes, people calling for a return to a golden age that never actually existed is a problem, but pushing back against that by insisting that everything has always been exactly as bad as it is right now in every respect for everyone everywhere and that any suggestion to the contrary is reactionary doesn't make you a hard-nosed realist, it just makes you a dipshit.

[alarajrogers]

And why are all the little girls from the 1800's scary? Have you ever considered their scary behavior is a response to everyone treating them like they're scary? Maybe if you recognized that the sudden skull faces and unexpected reverb in their voices and the way they seem to teleport are just little girls acting out -- as they should be expected to, in a situation as stressful as being dead -- and you showed them some compassion, they wouldn't be scaring you.

he has a name :(

[alarajrogers]

They are constantly reporting bad things he's done because he does constant bad things, but they are very often soft-pedaling what that thing actually is. "Overbroad statements" rather than "lying". "A pending constitutional crisis" rather than "illegally ignoring orders from judges." They kind of pretend that he is a normal bad president, like W was, rather than something that borders on an outside context problem.

Idk, with all the discussion about what Democrats need to do differently or whatever I think the reality is that voters just hold Trump to a lower standard than they do other politicians (in a way that benefits Trump), and while you can try to overcome that in other ways there's ultimately nothing you can do about it

[alarajrogers]

My first cat of my adult life was a tortie. We named her Milla, after Milla Jovovich. She was such a sweet, loving cat. Not terribly bright. She would groom me to show her love, but couldn't tell that my sweater is not connected to my nervous system the way her fur is connected to hers. And she would bring me presents of mice... and hide them under my sheets... at the foot of the bed... where I was too short to notice them until they started to rot... euw.

She was also a very shy and subdominant cat. We had to take in new cats temporarily on two occasions. She let them eat her food because she was too scared to confront them about it. No "tortitude" there.

My current torties do have some attitude to them, but Milla remains proof that this is not a genetic tortoiseshell trait.

And before he met me, my husband had an incredibly smart cat who was orange, named Frank. Frank could watch traffic lights and wait for green. Despite cats being kinda colorblind so who knows what color it looked like to him. (It was a road that got little traffic, so he was not waiting for a break in the traffic, he was absolutely waiting for the light.)

So yeah. Cat colors have nothing to do with personality or intelligence... though white cats with heterochromatic eyes are in fact usually deaf because that constellation of traits is linked in the genome.

i know most of the "orange cats are dumb and silly!!!" comments are meant in jest and just to have fun. but also it is so important to me that you guys know cat colors are not related to their intelligence levels. i had a woman recently tell me she would never own an orange cat because of how dumb they are.

[alarajrogers]

No. Bullshit.

Young white men have real problems. Lack of jobs. Lack of education. Lack of a future. In rural areas, they see their way of life dying, but they don't see how to escape it.

The Republican noise machine has convinced them the problem is that white women and non-white people have taken their jobs and their future. That's why they're flocking to white supremacist, misogynist causes. But the thing is, that isn't true. What's taking their futures is the lack of economic equality in this country. The billionnaires exploiting them.

Democrats could speak to that. Make it clear they do hear the voices of the young white men who feel they have no futures. Tell them what Democrats could do for them. But to do that, they'd have to actually have plans to end the extreme level of economic inequality in this country, and about half of them are also owned by billionnaires, just different ones.

Men care about jobs. Women do too. Rural white men care about there being jobs near their homes that they can do.. Offering green energy jobs in red states, laws that protect their rights as workers, so on. None of this would drive away women. And you don't need to feed into white supremacy to admit that nobody is helping the rural areas of the US, and that's wrong, and they deserve better.

The things Democrats would have to do to win young men back would chase away the female vote.

(This is the dipshit who's trying to primary Nancy Pelosi btw).

[alarajrogers]

I absolutely believe Vulcans would be my friend. I would respect their space and their lifestyle, and not put emotional pressure on them. I would also bring them fruit. See, people who evolved on a desert planet probably think vegetables that are full of water and sugar are fucking amazing. (Not too much fruit, they can get drunk on sugar.)

My most toxic trait is fully believing that I could get a Vulcan to like me

[alarajrogers]

Containers. As a person whose job requires me to log into 40 companies' Microsoft 365 tenant as the admin, containers saved my life. It's like Facebook containers on steroids. I recommend it for everybody.

oh god my old laptop got KO'd unexpectedly and it's looking like I maybe don't have my firefox account synched up properly so I'm having to re-do all the firefox extensions I used to have and I don't remember all the extensions I used to have. Or all the block updates I had in UBlock to keep youtube from being an ad-ridden hellscape.

Help, fellow hellsite users--what are your firefox extensions of choice?

[alarajrogers]

This reminds me of the time my cat Abyss had kittens six weeks after her sister Simi had. Abyss had no idea what she was doing and frequently ran off, leaving her blind kittens crawling across the floor mewling for her. Simi, now an experienced mom, would keep taking the kittens to her den, I imagine with exasperation at what a shitty mom her sister was being.

Cats absolutely will be like "Is anyone taking care of this kitten? No? Mine now" and walk off with it.

[alarajrogers]

I put down sixteen to twenty but I forgot about the ones in New York. I'm probably over twenty.

Baltimore Pratt: Hampden, Roland Park, Reisterstown Road, Cathedral Ave, maybe Broadway but not sure (4 for certain)

Baltimore County: Towson, Cockeysville, Catonsville, Pikesville, Owings Mills, North Point, White Marsh, Perry Hall, Loch Raven, Woodlawn, Arbutus, Essex, Randallstown (13)

Howard County: Columbia, East Columbia, Elkridge (3)

Harford County: Joppatown Rd (1)

Anne Arundel: Naah, I don't think I remember how to get to any of them

New York State: Howland, Fishkill, Grinnell (3)

So, uh, yeah, 24 of them. Without needing to look up how to get there. I don't remember how to get to Philadelphia's central library, the Newburgh library in New York, or the Montvale library in New Jersey, or how to get to New York City's central public library. I've been to several Anne Arundel libraries but not often enough to know how to get there. Frederick almost but I'd want to check a map just to be sure. I know how to get to a library in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, but I've never actually been there so I didn't count it.

Maybe I go to a lot of libraries.

You can use any travel method you like, walking, public transport, so on. You can get an uber but their map has failed so you'll have to give directions. You can travel to other countries and count those libraries but you have to be able to completely navigate from your home without assistance. So you can catch a plane but must be able to travel to and from the airport. No limit on how long it takes. If you know which block it's on or which tram line but aren't sure precisely, but you feel sure you'd find it once you got there, count that as a yes (if you're not sure maybe google it now and see if your plan would work). You cannot rely on asking for directions though, this must be all your knowledge

[alarajrogers]

If that were true someone could shoot Donald Trump with no consequences. It's fortunate for him he's talking out his ass like usual.

"He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."

--Donald Trump on Truth Social today

If that is true, FREE LUIGI, then.

[alarajrogers]

I've seen "What if the Confederacy won" in a comic book during the 80's. I have a feeling it's no longer remembered because the premise was deeply uncomfortable and edgelordy (Captain Confederacy and his black sidekick, anyone?)

And I've seen "What if the Black Death literally killed everyone in Europe?" I believe that was by Kim Stanley Robinson, and his aim was to explore "what if world history had no white people in it from the 13th century onward?"

But you're right, there are a lot more of the "what if the Nazis won" AUs. There are a lot of thought experimenty "would you kill Hitler as a baby to stop the Holocaust" questions being asked of characters in fiction, usually as a means to either justify killing a child or a means to say you can't change the past. But I can't think of any of them that actually resulted in Hitler dying in infancy and the Holocaust not happening.

being a jew studying preholocaust european jewish history is just *mourns over what could have been, mourns over what could have been, mourns over what could have been, mourns over what could have been, mourns-*

[alarajrogers]

I want to point out that that there are three special House elections coming up, 2 in FL and 1 in NY, and it is theoretically possible that if Elon Musk becomes sufficiently unpopular and drags the Republican brand down far enough, we could win all three... at which point Trump no longer has the House. The Republican majority in the House is three people. Three special election wins and they don't have the House anymore.

It is entirely possible that as of April 2025 Trump will not have all three branches of government. The House controls the purse strings. A House that is not under Republican control can defund any of Trump's efforts, and can make a lot more noise than the House is currently making about how Trump is ignoring the House's voted-upon-and-passed funds allocations. The House can also pass articles of impeachment, again, though they probably won't bother because we don't have a Senate majority.

It ain't over till we're all dead, folks.

I think a reason why I don't fully buy into "America will never recover on the world stage" is that history is long and foreign relations are odd things. Ask people 80 years ago if America and Japan would ever have very favorable views of each other and be close allies lol. Hell, just look at how much Germany's reputation recovered in much of the world after WWII. The point is that a lot of this isn't permanently set in stone and the takes about the “fall of the American empire” are premature