Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

If you have not seriously looked into this before, be prepared to discover that this process is bureaucratic, slow, infuriatingly difficult, often requires a job offer in advance, often requires formal education. It favours people with means and is nearly impossible if you are ill or disabled, even if you have family.

In all likelihood, it will be easier to move to another US state than to leave the country.

On my way home I saw one of the most Glasgow things possible

More handwritten text not shown in these 4 pictures:
• The left side says “Place your unwanted potentially useful bitsa shite here”
• The top flap says “If properly cared for this box should last 36 months in any weather”

Seeking a replacement phrase for "bless this person/thing", expressing I like what they are doing, I support them, I wish them the best, etc. without invoking religion.
Ideally equally short.

Okay so idk what I did but I hijacked https://garfield.com

I am now the official Garfield

what do

For those who need a break from the bleak, that fresh box of cat you ordered has arrived. Enjoy with reckless abandon.

#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

you can't tell me there's a cute furry fishing game. i can't lose another 100 hours of my life. no. please. no-

"just roll with it" genuinely the best advice

And I mean literally "with JS", including the package definitions, ie. not just a Nix language parser in JS

Today's project: a proof-of-concept to see whether a Nix-like system can be built with JS

@mynameistillian YES!

every potential outcome is a reason to fight

if you don't expect success, fight for hope
if you don't see hope, fight out of spite
if you can't act from spite, fight to be remembered in the annals of history
if you don't care about future history, fight for each other in the here and now

let every breath be an act of vengeance

my rationale is: if we are not doomed, we should fight, because we stand a chance. but if we are doomed, we should fight anyway, just in case that our actions and refusal to give up might create that chance. if not, then we will at least stick it to them.

if this earth is going to hell, let's at least make them pay first.

also: someone from the future will look down on us resisting and will be glad we did it.

🦾you know what? Fuck this self blaming “this is who we are” rhetoric about Trump I keep seeing.

I did nothing to deserve this situation. “We” do not “deserve” fascism. Nobody “deserves” fascism. This is not “who we are” this is who this government is. This isn’t a democracy, it’s a constitutional oligarchy, where they fuck with our minds to keep us from organizing.

Here’s your takeaway! Fewer people voted for Trump this year than in 2020.

He won because less people voted for Harris in 2024 than Biden in 2020. But more people voted for Harris this year than for Clinton in 2016 *even though she never went through a primary and only had 100 days to campaign*

So if I’m going to point fingers, I’m not pointing it at the Trump voters who are still a minority of people in this country.

I’m pointing it at the DNC, who keep fucking exploiting my fear of being bullied until I’m praying that people who support genocide win to save my own skin!

liberals are stumbling over themselves to perform allyship this week, so it's a great time to make your asks and give them a path to do something useful

the whole "we stand with you" thing tends not to last for long, so get something out of it while you can

It really annoys me when some people claim that workers don't have time to think about the news or politics because they're busy working.

What do you think they/we talk about on the job and during their breaks? Who do you think makes up literally all of unions? If anything people talked *way* too much about politics at some of my old places of work (I'm pretty sure a bloke who I taught how to use Microsoft Excel in the distant past was actually a closet nazi, and we were constantly clashing over his homophobia).

I didn't have lunch time arguments about whether or not people were the gender they say they are or if it's okay to be racist because of a terrorist attack (literally two things people were discussing over break room tabloids) at my old manual labour job just so y'all can let people off the hook for being dickheads because they're tired. We're all fucking tired. And it doesn't make you look sympathetic to the plight of workers, it makes you sound condescending.

At one point during Uni I was a full time student with two jobs *and* also a part-time carer and I still had the time and mental capacity to argue with the other students about whether or not Brexit was a good idea. This isn't a flex about my work ethic - I should not have had to do this, and I burned the fuck out within a year of graduation!

Our fellow workers aren't "thick" and they're not "lazy" and they're not just worked so hard that they're simply unable to tell that the famous posho scum you see every day on the fucking television are a bunch of bellends. We are drowning in a sea of misinformation because the ultra wealthy literally own like 80% of the ways people access consensus reality outside of their immediate surroundings. It's sometimes obvious, but mostly it's just a pervasive miasma of lies, infiltrating our senses and tainting how we all see the world and each other. Half this shit isn't even fucking real!

And *some* people, though far from most, actually *like* the taste of that misinformation, because it's set up to give them a license to be petty and selfish and cruel, and to blame all their problems on someone they've never met instead of having to face up to the actual nightmare scenarios before us. To give them a face to have a turn at stamping on. Someone lower down in the chain, to take it all out on as the bully at your back grinds you further and further into nothing.

The working classes are not some dull monolith. We can, and must do better, and those of us who are further out of that vicious sphere of influence need to actually work to destroy the machines imprisoning us all instead of lamenting how fucking disappointing everybody is.

so the democrats had this absolute fiasco and their takeaway was "we gotta move to the right"???

"WE GOTTA MOVE TO THE RIGHT"???

TO THE RIGHT???

YOU SCUMBAGS

YOU HAD ONE BILLION DOLLARS

ONE BILLION

As you can probably imagine, this work attracts a whole lot of well-intentioned straight white retired women with money+time on their hands, which…it is what it is, culturally and politically. None of this SHOULD be volunteer work, but the professional social worker I work with has literally dozens of cases. The needs are immediate.

So I will say that if you could use a way to make a child or teenager’s life a little safer and more stable in an increasingly scary time, this is a way to do that.

In the US, most states have programs that assign volunteer advocates to children and youth in the foster care system (CASA and GAL are the acronyms). Anyone with a clean record w/r/t kids can do the training. It’s the weirdest band-aid on a broken system but until we fix the system, it’s also essential work that helps keep kids from falling through some terrible gaps.

https://nationalcasagal.org/