pastalicious [he/him, undecided]

Back when I was trying, my system was to open up the Wikipedia pages for every city and town close enough to work at, find links to all their school districts and libraries and universities and city websites. Open every job listing on every site and apply to everything slightly in my wheel house.

In my experience school and government jobs are less shit than corporate jobs. They pay 30% less but you get treated like a human being. Sometimes the benefits are good… not always.

I see database and system design listings. It’s shit out there but good luck. Fingers crossed

The new logo sucks but the fact that you can lose $100 million because the little graphic above your store looks slightly different really demonstrates how fucking dumb capitalism is

All it took was a few tweets in the Trumpian style and promises of copying the Texas gerrymandering plan. Really reveals how jealous libs are of Trump.

Just texted “stop” to a DCCC text “from” Gavin a couple days ago then got this text today from Gavin but from a different political entity so it’s okay I guess. Volunteering for Bernie in 2020 continues to harm me in 2025

Isn’t that what happened to Wittgenstein?

This is as good a place as any… Someone dear to me is upset about ICE and genocide and has been seeing a lot of stuff about filing exempt on taxes and withholding money funding these horrors. I fully sympathize with the intent but worry it will only end up harming this person. I haven’t been able to reach them with this concern. Any hexagonal wisdom?

Seconded. They have more good takes than bad, great for keeping up with current events but not a replacement for real critical analysis.

(I’m not very articulate and I’m just doing stream of consciousness so I apologize if this seems incredibly cliched or unhinged) I feel this every time I log on and use a major social media platform. The spectacle exists to waste our time and abstract and obfuscate baseline reality. ‘Online is not real life’ but they got so much of the west to buy into it by pushing journalists throughout the 2010s to embrace Twitter. My friend was given quotas by her editor for how many times she should tweet per day. It was done with eye rolling condescension at the beginning but she quickly bought in. Culture war shit does the same thing. You can make a difference online; change some minds. (I feel like this spectacle of ideological clashing was where right wing personalities flipped and won the youth… it has the same energy we all had back when Jack Thompson was the most hated person on the internet; we had a battle and we were righteous in being trolls). Doxxing extends its tendrils into the real world. People getting jobs because of their online presence. All of this makes you feel as though online has a real gravity and importance to it. But online is not real life, it’s a mediated space. It trains people to exorcise their frustrations via online simulated activism in the form of posting. It’s like watching Schindlers List and feeling like you’re good because you recognize the moral in the movie… and then never actually fighting for any justice in real life… except the simulation online convinces you even more that you ARE fighting for justice. It trains people to use anodyne language like unalive. Importantly, online is a totally flat reality. Death and logging off look exactly the same to online, it’s just an account that no longer posts. So posting is proof of life. Money controls online more than it can ever control real life so money has an enhanced control over everyone there. And almost every platform quantifies ‘engagement’ as a spectacle for all to see, so we consciously or subconsciously train ourselves to get those numbers up. We maximize our activity for what will get upvotes and retweets and turn everyone into audience and performer. (This feels particularly prevalent on the large platforms. You’re tweeting for the imagined millions of people you don’t know. On smaller discords and places like hexbear we at least know eachother and have more of a peer relationship.)

Everyone wants to log off and ditch the smartphone, so they must all feel this too. I don’t know what solutions exist once we log off, but it does seem like leaving the major platforms is the only way to avoid having all our revolutionary energy siphoned off, and the only way to build the actual relationships that we will need to affect anything. End of rant.

A little extra effort but NightHawkInLight has a video on making phase change materials that “freeze” at 65 degrees and stay at that temp for hours. He soaks towels in the material and then seals them in vacuum bags. Pretty common and innocuous ingredients too.

I feel like my local DSA regulars would fit in ideologically here, but perhaps mediate and tone down their message to appeal to libs which unfortunately doesn’t work because the function of liberalism is to pacify nascent leftism.

I have a nearly unlimited supply of cardboard through my job. This video is amazing and gives me so many ideas!

Taking a look at hyperpalatable food products this month. 62% of food products in the U.S. meet the criteria for hyperpalatability which is when the food has a high enough concentration of salt, sugar and/or carbs to override the fullness response and reinforce binge eating.

I’ve finished a half assed day 1 of avoiding them and have nothing to report.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31689013/

https://readingfanon.blogspot.com/2013/07/in-conversation-with-mahmood-mamdani.html?m=1

He’s got a Wikipedia page. The Reading Fanon blogspot did the interview where he said this.

And for the doomers, even if he doesn’t win, we had him on TV talking about being a socialist and describing his platform to great applause, and we embarassed the Democrats effort to defeat him in the primary, showing how popular our politics are. The struggle is, itself, valuable.

Thing is, DSA had like 7,000 members throughout then 90s, 00s and early 10s. Since then elections that put socialism front and center have driven those numbers up above 70,000. I can say the chapter near me hasn’t spent any energy on elections this year, instead focusing on buying and forgiving medical debt and putting people on a picket line so local workers didn’t have to be there for 72 hours straight without any breaks. The fact that the primary was covered so widely and people were clapping for an avowed socialist is not nothing. But we should still temper our expectations.

Reminds me of that old last week tonight about China building ghost cities nobody lives in. Fast forward a year and they’re bustling cities full of people.

Didn’t Andrew do some shady groomer shit or something?