Plants like this exist. #medicagoscutellata (at South West Philadelphia)
Blog
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My son, who is 4, and I were walking along the street today and saw a man with his left leg amputated beneath the knee. My son spun around and looked at him, then said to me, “That man lost his leg! What happened?”
I said I didn’t know exactly, but sometimes people lost arms or legs through accidents or didn’t have them for other reasons.
My son instantly said, “Gobber (from How to Train Your Dragon) lost his arm AND his leg and now he has to use tools in their places!”
I kind of collected my jaw and said, “That’s right, and that man is just like Gobber. There’s a special word we use for those kinds of tools. It’s ‘prosthetics’.”
“Prosthetics,” said my son, with satisfaction, and on we went without any further discussion about it.
But then we got on the bus, and there was a young black woman with her hair pulled back in a big floofy afro ponytail, and my son, who has seen the trailers for the new Annie movie, said, in delight, “She has hair like Annie’s!”
Representation matters.
Reblogging because, yes it does. And because this post is a great example of why representation matters not only to the people seeing themselves represented in movies books etc. but also for everyone else.
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vox:
Police officers explain how they’re encouraged to act in racist ways
These NYPD officers are the plaintiffs in class-action lawsuit alleging the department is violating a 2010 state ban on arrest quotas.
“We’re the predator. They’re the prey,” Pedro Serrano told NBC4 in New York. “The worst thing you can have is a police officer that needs an arrest for the month.”
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Why Hikaru Sulu being gay is so important:
– Star Trek is a huge cinematic franchise. It is huge. It has thousands of fans of all different ages. This is a huge, huge step for diversity in wide spread cinema.
– The writers says Sulu will have a husband and a daughter. Not only will he be happy, he will have a family, he will have a KID. Considering how bleak LGBT representation has been this year alone, having a happy little girl with two Daddys is incredible.
– Science fiction does not tend to be an area where we have LGBT representation.
– Sulu is a main character. He has been an important part of the series and is a major badass.
– John Cho is Korean- American, so not only are we having LGBT representation but POC – LGBT representation!
– Star Trek have announced Sulu’s sexuality before the film is even out. So therefore giving a big fuck you to any homophobes who now won’t go see the film. Zero fucks given.
– And best of all: the original actor who played Sulu came out in 2005 as a gay man – Sulu being gay is paying respect to real life events. How cool is that?
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Ubisoft’s gamer survey first asks if you’re female, and terminates if you say “yes”
The first question in this Ubisoft customer survey is “What is your gender” with “Male” and “Female” as permitted responses; if you choose “Female,” you’re dumped into a screen that informs you that “your profile doesn’t suit the survey.”
Games companies have got a lot of stick over the years for their failure to understand, cater to, and appreciate their masses of female customers, but it’s a rare thing for a company’s commercial blind-spots to be so vividly illustrated in two screens.
http://boingboing.net/2016/07/05/ubisofts-gamer-survey-first.html
BOYCOTT UBISOFT until it joins the 21st century.
According to the linked article and Ubisoft’s Twitter, it was a logic mistake in the survey programming that they have now fixed.
But being a statistician who has written and disbursed surveys, I can say this: this is still sexist af, even if the intention wasn’t to dissuade women from taking the survey. When you create a survey, the first thing you do is test it, and then you have your colleague(s) test it. Naturally, you use your own demographics and responses. This means that this survey was likely not passed to a single woman in its development.
Ubisoft is really showing off its internal hiring process and who they give work to with this blunder. Spoiler: it isn’t women.
–CM Lilith
Not only that, but not one of these men thought to answer “female” to the very first question.
When you’re trying to test something, you have to try all sorts of things in order to break it, just to see where the faults are.
Not one dudebro in Ubisoft thought to answer “female” to the First Question.
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Remembering the officers lost in the Dallas shooting
Five officers were killed by at least one sniper near a peaceful protest in Dallas on Thursday night. They served the Dallas Police Department and the Dallas Area Rapid Transit agency. Here are their names and stories.
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and now, the weather.
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Today was hard for a couple reasons: the news of police killing more Black folks, the news of a seemingly lone wolf sniper killing police at an otherwise peaceful #blacklivesmatter protest, my fears about what repercussions that will have on Black communities and social justice movements, AND that it was extremely hot and humid. But the embodied acts of tending to plants, harvesting and threshing seed, giving water to thirsty beings who will in turn give food and seed to us – this was meaningful and better than being on a loop with the Internet or listening to mildly white supremacist talk radio (yep, talking about nice liberal NPR). I’m about to be away for a week co-facilitating a training at Soul Fire Farm, but if in the future you’d like to join me in an embodied tending to seed crops or even just to come sit in the shade at our seed collection or one of my Philly seed gardens, let me know. Here is Landis Winter Lettuce, going to flower and seed.
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Imagine having braces during the apocalypse. no one can take your braces off. And you just have to accept that you’ll have braces forever.
i want a novel focused around a character with braces during the apocalypse and the entire plot of the story revolves around their search for an orthodontist who is still alive and they sort of accidentally save the world in the process
Titled: Brace for It.