Got pulled over because he “saw someone flash their lights at me” and it made him “think something was going on”. After he ran my paperwork and did multiple full walk-arounds of my car, he decided everything was in order and I was free to go. I just wanted to get home from work.
Living in MD got pulled over when I pulled into my landlady’s [100%, rich, suburban] community and questioned what my purpose was there. “I live here” was not an acceptable answer and I ended up needing to call my landlady to talk to the officer and convince them that I really did live there, in her basement inlaw apartment, courtesy of her granddaughter. When he finally let me go he told me he “actually” pulled me over because he “thought [my] headlights were out” but on “second glance” they were just fine. Dunno how you can mistake headlights being on or off.
And I know I’ve told the story of when one of my elderly white neighbors called the police on me for training my dog in a public use field and how even the cop that showed up thought the call was stupid and racist.
My dad got pulled over when I was still in a carseat because they thought it was “suspicious” that a grown man would have such a young child with him on a school day. He was driving me back to school from a doctor’s appointment. They made him get our of the car, lean against it, and searched both him and the car because they “smelled something” while he did his best to keep me calm and tell me that it was going to be okay. I was too young to understand what happened at the time. I just remember he was furious the entire ride back to school, and he was still mad when I got off the bus that afternoon.
It really is just Like This, being black in this country.
Please return us to a world where Notp and squick are used for a ship you don’t like instead of just making up a load of bullshit about how immoral it is or w/e lol
a short selection of concepts and phrases that used to be commonplace in fandom and we’d really benefit from making that a thing again:
NOTP: the opposite of an OTP (One True Pairing). It is a ship a fan strongly dislikes. The word is a portmanteau of ‘no’ and ‘OTP’ and thus is not a contraction of any particular phrase.
Squick: anything that is a deep-seated, visceral turn-off.
Squicks may be shared by many fans or be specific to one; one person’s kink may be another person’s squick.
YKINMKATO, or kink-tomato: Your Kink Is Not My Kink, And That’s Okay: used to indicate support for fannish diversity and to distinguish between disapproval or kink shaming and simply having different taste.
DLDR: Don’t Like, Don’t Read: a phrase used to warn against complaints about an aspect of fic or meta. A “live and let live” philosophy of fandom, which places the
responsability for avoiding content one doesn’t want to see on the side
of the fanwork consumer, rather that on the creator’s.
SALS: Ship And Let Ship: similar to the above specifically about shipping tastes.
YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary: a phrase used to acknowledge that any given individual’s personal opinion on the topic at hand may differ due to their own tastes, standards, values, experiences, etc.
As the OP points out, all of these crucially imply no moral judgment of what they’re designing.
(definitions lifted more or less wholesale from fanlore’s relevant pages)
i know the ‘is mcdonalds a date’ questions making its rounds but i feel kind of insane bc thats never even been a metric for me. a date is just when someone says its a date. i went on a date w someone to smoke in a building w a caved in cieling in the rain, shoplifted from a gas station paranoid as hell to get them a soft pretzel and then we chased a rat around. where is your sense of adventure people
also ill be honest now in a relationship w my bf for almost four years and living together for two… the person whos gonna stick w u is the one that even a mcdonalds date sounds fun with. theyre the person whos gonna understand when youre tired from work and just want to watch a movie together. or understands when u cant do something grandiose and just wants to be with you.
if you cant learn to like the person you’re with and not the expectation youve built in your mind for who they SHOULD be, you’ll never love like that. you’ll miss the person right in front of you, and thats the saddest thing of all.
every so often im struck by the memory of one of my college professors getting very angry with our class (art history of pompeii 250) because when she excitedly detailed the ingenious roman invention of heated floors in bathhouses via hearths in small crawlspaces, we asked who was tending the fires. she said “oh, slaves i suppose. but that isnt the point”. and we said that it actually very much was the point. she had just told us that in roman society there were dozens of people, maybe hundreds, who spent every day of their enslaved lives crawling in cramped, hot, smoky tunnels to light fires to warm pools of water (which they were not allowed to swim in). how could that not be the point?
she wanted us to focus on the art, on the innovation of heated plumbing, on the tiles and decorations of the bathhouses, and all we wanted to do was learn more about the people under the floors. and she didn’t know anything more about that. in fact, she said she thought we were focusing too much on superfluous details.
it feels almost hokey to put too fine a point on the idea im getting at here but i will anyway: There are a lot of people who are still under the floors. all these beautiful, convenient, brilliant innovations of modern society (think fast fashion, chatgpt, uber, doordash) are still powered by people working in inhumane, untenable conditions.
the people who run these systems want you to focus on the good - who doesnt love warm water? - but if anything is going to improve or change in our lifetimes, you need to examine these things with an attentive, critical, and empathetic eye. and for fucks sake stop ordering from amazon
Hot queer spaces tip: never trust any spot that has fewer than 2 fat and hairy people present!! You have no idea what other problems the space has if they can’t even meet the bear minimum
I think about my one friend in high school, who was not technically allowed to read anything that her parents didn’t approve of. There was a special exception for things required by school, but they’d go over those at home and “correct” any bad information.
She checked out 2 books a day from the school library and read voraciously on her own and returning the books to the library at the end of the day. She’d get done work early or just skip any work time in class to read her books.
Her parents were ‘old-fashioned’ too. They didn’t think their child should be reading anything they didn’t personally approve of first.
There was a reason she never told her parents she checked out books from the school library. There was a reason none of the teachers scolded her for reading or told her parents about it during parent-teacher conferences.
They were actively preventing further abuse of a vulnerable teenager under their care.
I seem to be thinking a lot of her lately with everything, everything that is happening.
There’s people for whom “we’re leaving in the morning” means “we ride at dawn motherfuckers, you can finish waking up and getting dressed in the car, we’ll grab breakfast somewhere along the way”, and there’s people for whom it means “we’ll get going somewhere before noon”.
Two robotgirls trying to step past eachother, but they have the same pathfinding algorithm so they get stuck trying to step around eachother forever
This, too, is yuri
THIS ROBOT YURI IS DOCTOR APPROVED!
Image id: a comment from aunsiro reading “Hi Op, I am doing a PhD in trajectory optimization algorithms for robots and I just want to say that I am dying of laughter with this mental image and I love you. End id.
