#knowing full well it wont

[saoirseuwu]

Should I stay up to play stardew valley all night, it might fix my sleep schedule

[twentyfivemiceinatrenchcoat]

man who wants u to spit in his mouth (<- intimately) but does not know how to broach the subject u are very dear to me .

[aranansi]

Lounging

[glafifo]

Mr Shepherd...

[humanmorph]

"[high pitched and tinny] Let’s dive in. Let’s dive in. It’s time to dive in. Get ready to [audio distorts and slows] dive. Diiive. Diiiiie…" (The Road to PALISADE 20: City Planning Department)

so that's what i've been working on for the past 2 weeks! i wanted to draw something for this intro ever since i first listened to it (as a companion piece to my other gur drawing, though it of course ended up being way bigger in scale), but it only really gripped me about halfway through PALISADE ep 18. the next morning after that i listened to this narration on repeat for about 45 minutes and then made a big sketch on 4 sheets of paper at my desk at work.

anyways, i haven't listened to the new episode yet but i think i'm probably ready for whatever they're gonna throw at us with the next sortie. i'm gonna believe, against it all, in millennium break. for gur

(i recommend listening along while scrolling! + transcript btw. if anything is hard to read)

[thegreatyin]

assume this is whatever sort of genre and style of story you most desire to read at this very moment. a fanfiction of your favorite fandom OTP. a classic work of literature. a multimedia webcomic at 2am. all that matters is what writing style you prefer. do not use the examples as a signifier of the writing quality or what kind of story it is, they are purely to explain the difference in POV styles

[faaun]

said goodbye to him feeling weird!

[smartwatermagic]

Smartwatermagic "I can make you worse" dynamic but it's Al knowing his partners can be one of the biggest threats against Olympus and insistently trying to get them to turn their backs on the gods

Oh Olympus exiled him because he's a corrupting influence? WELL WHAT IF HE ACTUALLY BECOMES ONE, CHECKMATE OLYMPIANS—

[firelise]

my academic analysis...

[jesseisquick]

Does anyone know of a Star Trek: Strange New Worlds critique/analysis video that isn't just "rahhhh wokeness BAD!!!" or "rahhhh modern trek BAD!!!"?

[quaranmine]

im not american and i just saw your recent posts about all the firings. what is going on, what do they gain from this??

What's going on? Basically a hostile takeover of the American government.

What do they gain from this? Money. Control. Privatization. More money into the hands of billionaires. It's not a coincidence that the richest man in the world is leading the charge.

They're breaking the govenment intentionally, and then when nothing works and everything is suffering, they'll privatize all the services. They'll cut government workers under the claim of saving money, and then hire contractors to work in the same positions for more money. I'm sure it's no coincidence that Elon Musk himself has had $18 billion in government contracts. Or that the State Department was going to buy $400 million in armored Tesla cars.

When the National Parks can't function under a skeleton staff and no limits on entry numbers, they'll sell the federal land to a corporation to run, and then they'll sell it again for mining and drilling. They'll deregulate all the environmental laws and worker protection laws to make sure that corporations can maximise the profit completely. It's easier to make money if you can just dump your toxic waste anywhere! Nothing being done right now makes any sense to help anybody but the richest people in the country.

Why are they going against the federal workforce? Well, the Republicans have been aiming to attack civil service as part of their platform. They say it is full of inefficiency and fraud, but make no mistake--Washington D.C., voted overwhelmingly blue, and that's part of their rage. They're literally putting federal employees--mostly black people!--on watchlists and doxxing them, for reasons that include donating to the Democratic party. (Federal employees are subject to the Hatch Act, which prevents them from campaigning on behalf of any political party or doing political activity at work, but as private citizens on their own time and property they may vote and donate how they choose.)

So, Elon Musk donates massive amounts of money to Trump's campaign during the election. He hosted giveaways of a $1 million dollars a day for swing state voters who would vote for Trump and somehow this was deemed legal. Trump wins, and in return for his service, Elon Musk is given a special government position and access to everything. It's called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and they've installed people in major agencies to monitor employees, they've accessed the US Treasury, they've locked government employees out of IT systems that include the personal information of all federal employees, they've accesses sensitive government data, leaked classified information, and they're just getting started. They have access to the payment systems of Social Security and Medicaid, and Medicare. None of these people are elected, many are younger than me, and none have had background checks or clearance. One of them was fired from an internship for leaking company secrets so.....I don't really have confidence he won't leak national security secrets either.

The main thing DOGE is doing right now, other than possibly feeding all our data into AI and stealing it, is slashing the federal workforce. Shortly after Trump took office, DOGE via the Office of Personnel Management (OPM, a key player in this story) sent all 2.6 million federal employees a deferred resignation ("buyout") offer titled Fork in the Road. It's worth mentioning that "Fork in the Road" is the exact same email that Elon Musk sent to all the Twitter employees shortly before laying everyone off....and then he failed to pay them the promised severance. If federal employees accepted the offer, they'd be place on paid leave through September and have a chance to look for another job. Nevermind that much of what was promised wasn't legal. Nevermind that the probationary employees who took the offer found out yesterday that they never qualified in the first place and got fired anyway. Meanwhile, the daily Fork emails continued to use insulting language like that "the way to American prosperity" was for federal employees to "leave their low productivity public sector jobs and take a high productivity private sector job." The White House press secretary said that employees who didn't resign were ripping off the American people. Fox news says they should "get real jobs." Note that the demonization is intentional:

Russel Vought, one of the architects of Project 2025 (the rulebook they're following exactly), who is now the leader of the Office of Management and Budget, literally said the goal was to traumatize federal employees so they'd no longer want to go to work and the American people would hate them. Also, people have been able to use metadata to see that these Project 2025 people have been the ones writing various OPM government memos (some are not even government employees!)

The claim: federal employees are wasting taxpayer money with their....pesky jobs in public health, food inspections, veterans healthcare, wildfire support jobs. Note that federal employees are only 4% of the entire budget, and that there's roughly the same amount of them as there were in the 1960s, despite the population of the country rising since then. The job of DOGE: get rid of as many as possible.

So. Day one of the Trump presidency, he issued an executive order demanding the end of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in government programs. Make no mistake that DEI is the new slur for POC and LGBT people right now (remember the watchlist earlier with mostly black people on it? Now look at claims that agencies are taking down posters of minority scientists.) And make no mistake they aren't also coming for the A that normally goes on the end of DEIA, for accessibility (disabled people.) Using this executive order they placed many government employees administrative leave pending termination. They've also interpreted this to include environmental justice. Trump also blamed the recent plane crash over the Potomac on people with disabilites, and DEI. Washington Post reports that the next step for DOGE is to start identifying "DEI-focused" positions that aren't explicitly about implementing DEI....so we can all guess what "type" of employees will be targeted.

Then, step two. Probationary employees. Government employees in the United States have civil service protections. This is because the government used to operate on a spoils system where each election, the new president would fire everyone and hire loyalists to him. Turns out that kind of shakeup every 4 years is bad, and it's better if you can get subject matter experts to stick around across administrations. So federal employees have legal protections against firing them at random. Trump is trying to eliminate that, by the way, by insitituting a broad recategorization of federal employees who are in "policy influencing positions" to be able to fire them at-will. (The definition of "policy influencing" here is intentionally so broad that it will affect most employees in the government regardless of whether they have any influence on policy or not.) Oh! And remember the Fork email? Yeah, there's language in those emails about employees who don't resign needing to be "loyal." Will they be required to be loyal to Trump?

But in the meantime while he waits to fire everyone else, they're going after probationary employees first. This is because for the first 1-2 years of service as a government employees, you can be removed easier (they still must justify bad performance though.) It's not just new employees--the probation can reset when you take a new position, so experienced people with many years of service were also let go simply because they changed jobs within the last year. Around 200k~ probationary employees are in the federal workforce, and thousands got fired in the last two days and thousands more will be fired by Tuesday. This includes brilliant scientists in the middle of projects, with some people saying there's no staff left to feed living animals that were under their care. They're firing CDC epidemiologists. Wildfire support personnel in the Forest Service. People who are doing emergency response work right now in LA for the cleanup are being fired during this, despite the fact they're working 7 days a week, 12+ hours a day (sooooo lazy though, right?) The Trump admin also accidentally fired a bunch of people in charge of nuclear weapons since they didn't know what their jobs actually were, and had to scramble to undo that. It's tax season in the US, and the IRS may layoff thousands of workers.

It shoud be noted that a lot of these firings were illegal, because probationary employees can be fired in the case of bad performance, but it's stupid to claim that 200,000 people are all bad performers. Many of these people have paperwork documenting a glowing performance review. They'll be sued. But Trump and Elon are moving fast and trying to break enough things that the courts won't be able to stop all of it in time.

Nobody else is safe either, of course. On Tuesday Trump passed an executive order demanding agencies to conduct large scale reductions in force (RIFs). There's no knowledge yet on just how many more people this will target in the future. I can't give you an estimate how many people will be fired in the next few months, but nobody is safe.

Why does this matter for the average person? Well, this will affect everyone in the US. It'll affect highway safety. It'll affect product recalls. It'll affect food inspections and food recalls. It'll affect clean water systems and air pollution reduction. It'll affect enforcement action against polluters. It'll affect public health. It'll affect research. It'll affect fair housing. It'll effect the economy and consumer protections. It'll affect banking. It'll affect farmers. It'll affect people who rely on food stamps, childcare services, etc. It'll mean that the public will have less recourse to get things fixed, less of a chance of getting help for issues. It will affect the private sector when contractors get fired. It will affect local and state government when the grants that fund their programs get pulled. It will affect nonprofit employees. It will affect universities. It will affect government funded programs like Poison Control. So much of government work is functionally invisible to the average citizen, and things will start breaking in the next year. This concentrated attack to dismantle the government is the first step to dismantling everything else.

[ninja-knox-ur-sox-off]

The way I'm just staring at my screen waiting for my knuckles amv to upload

[wewerebornsextuplets]

designed yokai au kiru today and then Promptly realized how tiny the matsus are compared to her in this au and now im giggling

[puexii]

Cant sleep so have this drawing I probably won't finish :P

Pose suddenly didn't make sense so I stopped, ye

Strings in their hands are supposed to show how Axis has much control, they were gonna be blue

However, Axis is very much not free, under the constant threat of deactivation, they must do everything perfectly with no mistakes, or they will become like the first Overseer. A constant threat Axis experiences. Other strings were gonna be white

While they may not experience most emotions, they can experience fear, which to their understanding was meant for self preservation

Additionally, despite all the power they have, they are stuck in their greatest blind spot (by design) which is sector zero

Actually, Axis's emotions are disabled, not non existent, implying they can be reenabled somehow, which I don't think they would like. Such large scale influence must not be hindered by selfish experiences, the quest for perfection in efficiency is one where you do not matter. Emotions will only blind you and destroy all you've built, as has happened with the first Overseer.

And yet, Axis chose to reactivate him, the failure they've always been warned against becoming,

Because they did not trust that they could keep this perfect efficiency constant, at least, they needed a backup in case of their inevitable failure.

And what better than your own predecessor?

[acourtofquestions]

Overhead, the stars shone clear and bright, and though Mala had only once appeared to him at dawn, on the foothills across this very city, though she might be little more than a strange, mighty being from another world, he offered up a prayer anyway.

Then, he had begged Mala to protect Aelin from Maeve when they entered Doranelle, to give her strength and guidance, and to let her walk out alive. Then, he had begged Mala to let him remain with Aelin, the woman he loved. The goddess had been little more than a sunbeam in the rising dawn, and yet he had felt her smile at him.

Tonight, with only the cold fire of the stars for company, he begged her once more.

A curl of wind sent his prayer drifting to those stars, to the waxing moon silvering the camp, the river, the mountains.

He had killed his way across the world; he had gone to war and back more times than he cared to remember. And despite it all, despite the rage and despair and ice he'd wrapped around his heart, he'd still found Aelin. Every horizon he'd gazed toward, unable and unwilling to rest during those centuries, every mountain and ocean he'd seen and wondered what lay beyond... It had been her. It had been Aelin, the silent call of the mating bond driving him, even when he could not feel it.

They'd walked this dark path together back to the light. He would not let the road end here.