when male academics constantly refer to men by their surnames and women by their first names
like you’d never go to a lecture expecting shakespeare to be referred to as “william” but it’s not at all uncommon to sit through an entire lecture in which jane austen is referred to constantly as “jane”
it’s such a petty thing but it just really rubs me the wrong way, like it has a real suggestion of respect and admiration/lack thereof
kind of like how during the 2016 election everything was Trump vs Hillary
did y’all, perhaps, forget there was a whole other Clinton in office before and that maybe they used her first name to avoid confusion, lol?
We’ve had two President Roosevelts, no one refers to them as Roosevelt and Franklin. Even newspaper headlines from the times called them simply Roosevelt
We recently had two President Bushes. Bush Sr. was still alive when Bush Jr. was running and in office, and news agencies still referred to him as Bush
America was able to read this headline and hundreds like it and know which Bush it was talking about. When the news mentioned a Bush vs Gore debate we all knew that it wouldn’t be the ex-president debating
There was even a Bush running against Trump in the primaries and no one said Jeb vs Trump
socialistsephardi: Speaking as members of Gen Z, this. Most people we know out own age are atleast vaguely into socialism and hyperaware of capitalism and the nature of our society being absolute dystopian shit I’d love to hear about organizations … Continue reading →
Fun and good thing to say to a mad gamer in their video game who is YELLING: “hey buddy its okay. its just a fun toy. We’re just playing with a fun toy together, okay?”
Y’all laugh, one time I told a guy on Reddit “It’s ok that you didn’t like the movie” about Star Wars and I have never seen someone get SO mad SO fast
Being nice to nerds is like spraying red musk into the eyes of a furious bull
Questionable Content is such a weird example of genre shift. For most of it’s history, it was a Hipster Soap Opera, with a wacky robot because webcomics at the time usually had a wacky robot sidekick.
And then, having established the existence of Wacky Robot Sidekicks, he added more robots, making it a common thing for underemployed 20-somethings to have wacky robot sidekicks.
And then you start getting, not really speculative fiction, but retro-justified fiction, designed to create a framework to explain why some people just have Wacky Robot Friends, because he didn’t want to be writing some weird dystopian sci-fi where sentient robots exist, but are forced to be some weird combination of a personal computer, a pet, and roommate, he established that being a Wacky Robot Sidekick is basically just another job that some robots have.
Which, of course, implies the existence of OTHER jobs that robots have.
And, like the Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, he kept worldbuilding, and QC has become this weird comic about a world that is as much like our world as possible, except that a not unreasonable portion of the population are fully sentient AIs, doing everything from cutting edge research to sitting on your couch making bad jokes.
It’s not like futurama, where the whole joke was that the world was basically unchanged, despite the addition of robots and aliens and stuff. The robots world-building stuff just kind of happened because the author put in a robot and then kept thinking about it.
I keep thinking about an article I read several years ago about how activists got a coal plant shut down when the corporation wanted it to have its license extended for another 20 years. No-one knew who should take credit for the win – the lawyers suing for health reasons, the lawyers suing for worker protections, the activists protesting politicians and corporate offices, the activists who chained themselves to the plant gates, the group who pressured banks to refuse loans for the plant, etc. A while later someone read the company’s annual report and it more or less said they’d cancelled the plant, not because of any single reason, but because all the difficulties across so many aspects of the project made it more trouble than it was worth. They could win on one or two problems, but not a dozen attacks at once, especially when they were all weary from fighting the last battle. I wish I could find the article again, it was much more interesting than I make it sound!
But in the same way that people here keep reminding us all that this is a marathon and not a sprint, I think it’s important to attack Trump and the Republicans on all fronts rather than try to find the one perfect sniper shot to take them down. There should not be a single aspect of their working life where they can escape protests and delays and being overruled by courts and new lawsuits and bad publicity and stupid jokes about them and investigations into their affairs. Washington? Investigators and lawsuits. Home town on recess? Angry locals. Media? Questions about what they knew and when. Internet? Demands for healthcare and video compilations of them saying daft things.
It’s not that one of those tactics is a silver bullet, it’s that this is a war of attrition and every little bit of hassle is worth it. Every individual Republican congressperson should be dreading the sound of a phone or notification because it will be yet another fire they have to put out. They shouldn’t have time to provide assistance to their colleagues or cover for Trump, or time out to refresh and regroup. There are more citizens than there are politicians – tag team until they break ranks.
This Metafilter comment is good and smart and makes me feel better about the work ahead of us.
This is not a tumblr. 