Signtist

People always assume I want to turn my hobby into a job. I love to bake - it helps me de-stress from my job. If I made it my job, I wouldn’t have something to help me de-stress anymore. I make enough money; I don’t need to extract the joy from everything in my life for the sake of making more money.

Yeah, there’s always the underlying faith in the system in these types of stories. They assume that if someone was found guilty, they must have done it. The only ones that I see that go against that are ones where’s it’s been proven that they were falsely convicted, and even in those it’s usually framed as some freak one-in-a-million accident without anyone at fault.

Good to know I’m not the only one! My wife was just talking about watching Pocahontas with our niece, and rolled her eyes so hard when I told her I’d poke her hontas.

I’ll often repeat things my wife says in the “I’ll x your y” format as if it were a cheesy pickup line. Like, she’ll ask if I can grab the remote, and I’ll say “I’ll grab your remote.” She hates it.

I mean, they’re trying to say that the terrible colonialism practiced by the European-based American people against the native Americans is happening again in Israel, which is definitely a good point to be made. We’re well past the ability to stop the atrocities committed by America in the past, but we’re able to stop Israel today. The same idea applies to the terrible treatment of non-while populations in America today by ICE and other agencies, while we’re on the topic of preventable atrocities.

I’ll find a few new songs to be the first in my new library. I love finding new music, and transitioning from one library to another helps me take some time away from songs that might be getting stale to focus on new stuff. It also gives me the opportunity to rediscover songs from previous libraries after some time, and fall in love with them again. Just today I added a song to my library that I used to have on my old iPod, and I’m listening to it a bunch now that it’s been several years since I’ve last heard it.

My sister is like this, and she’s basically just constantly anxious about what she’s supposed to be doing and how people feel about her, so she forces herself to be talkative and energetic even though it exhausts her. It’s sad to know that behind her smile she’s just always stressed out about every little thing that she construes as someone maybe being mad at her. I’m glad that over the years I’ve been able to get her to be her real self around me, but I haven’t been able to get her to see a therapist yet.

I’ve been doing a few Duolingo lessons a day in Japanese for a couple years now. At the rate I’m going it’ll be a decade before I’m even slightly able to understand the language, but I don’t mind - it’s already been well over a decade since I first tried to learn it, so as long as this pace is sustainable, I’ll still be a lot further along than if I’d tried too hard, gotten burned out, and quit for a decade again.

When I was a kid trying to play flash games on dial-up internet, I found they took almost exactly the same amount of time to load as it took for me to make and eat a sandwich. I ate a lot of sandwiches.

Better in a vacuum, yes, but as /u/disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world pointed out, a huge amount of voters pay absolutely no attention, and just vote for whatever color they’ve always voted for. Hell, a bunch of people searched “Did Joe Biden drop out?” on election day, because they paid so little attention that they didn’t even know about Harris. That’s an extreme example, sure, but it’s just not a realistic expectation to think people will really think hard about a 3rd party, especially when it won’t get a proportionate amount of attention even if it got a huge amount of support, thanks to the billionaire-backed media.

If we don’t get someone into one of the 2 established parties, we’re crippling ourselves, likely to the point of immediate failure. It would be significantly more viable to change one of the parties by flooding it with new socialist politicians than it would be to build up a new platform based on socialism from the start.

It’s no accident, I’m sure. They are better, as they’re not helping the killers, but they’re nowhere near as good as is necessary to stop them. Pretty much the perfect definition of the average democratic politician these days: you vote for them to stop the killing, but you know that - whether by choice or not - they won’t do anything to prevent more deaths when the killers come back into power.

I’m happy we’re electing people like Zohran Mamdani, but we’re going to need a lot more of them before our leftmost viable party can be considered even a little left. We need politicians that make change, and when the system doesn’t let them, they band together with the rest of the population to force it, instead of just complaining about how they wish they could make change but can’t. The leaders need to be leading the charge, to battle if necessary.

That’s the thing; most democrat politicians hate him nearly as much as the republican ones do, as they’re more similar to one another than either is to him. There are a few exceptions, but we’re going to need people aligned with Mamdani to be the norm rather than the exception if we want the democratic party to become a real force for good.

When I was a kid someone gave me a “buttered popcorn” flavored dum-dum sucker. It tasted so terrible that it gave me a taste aversion to real buttered popcorn for nearly 2 decades.