It would have made more sense if they were of Japanese ancestry, but still an American citizen who grew up during WWII era.

Although, if that HAD been the case, they wouldn’t be posting here. Because they’d be dead.

…I’m just now realizing that enough time has passed that statement doesn’t have the same impact it should. I’m not talking about old age. I’m talking about how the united states would gather AMERICAN CITIZENS who have comitted no crimes whatsoever, send them to camps, and have them mass killed/arrested. Everybody talks about Hitlers camps, nobody talks about America doing the EXACT SAME THING, ROUGHLY AT THE SAME TIME!!!

Oh, me? No, I’m not of Japanese ancestry. I just like calling out Americas bullshit, because so many people like to think it’s some high and mighty better than thou place which can do no wrong. It was founded by slave holders who claimed all men are created equally. It was then held for about 150 years before women were seen as anything more than property who weren’t allowed to vote. It routinely throughout history told it’s citizens what it means to be normal, and a real American. Anything else was considered unpatriotic, and unpatriotic people were the enemy. Do the McCarthy years sound firmiliar?

And now, we stand on the doorstep of a new presidency, of a man who self identifies as a fascist dictator, who has held public admiration for places like North Korea, and Russia, for their leaders ability to go unchecked. It would be one thing if this were a sneaky coup. Some one individual somehow someway snuck his way into power which is so often the case with dictators throughout history. But no. This was chosen. This was the American electoral collage giving him a landslide win, AND getting the popular vote. America wants this. America wants to go down this same path that we have gone down many times before, and each generation eventually comes to the conclusion that it’s bad.

And no group is immune. You can’t say “This is only white men who voted for him”. No, this is men, women, whites, blacks, latinos, arabs, asains, everybody. This is EVERYBODY. We have chosen a road of fascism. We have told the world “THIS is what America is.”

And for that, no. I will not consider myself a patriot who stands for the values and beliefs of this country, when those beliefs are that we all should bow down and accept our place in life.

FUCK

THAT.

Make it so!

My grandmother died last year at the age of 103. I’m 41. I can remember being a kid, before she became too old to maintain the house she raised 4 kids in. It was a BIG house. It had a HUGE backyard, that as a kid I didn’t have any appriciation for how massive that place was. Now, today, I remember the 80s, and think “wait…was my grandpa rich before he died?” I was 5 when he died, but he picked out the house in the 1960s, that she then lived alone in after he died. All her children were adults with their own children by then.

The end result is, she said to my grandpa “I don’t care what you do inside the house. I don’t care how you decorate. I don’t care what furniture you buy. I just want a comfortable bed, and that backyard is MINE.” My grandpa, who HATED maintaining the outdoors, readily agreed to this. It meant she would do the yardwork that men of the time were mostly expected to do. While he got the house to himself (mostly). She used the backyard to grow a garden. A big garden. Lived in the city, but you’d swear this was a farmland with no animals.

Everytime I’d go over to her house as a kid, I’d run to the garden and pick off beans. These long pod style green beans. And these other green beans which were more narrow.

I’d eat them right where they were growing. And every time my dad would be like “HEY!!! THAT’S NOT YOUR GARDEN!!! YOU CAN’T JUST EAT THINGS FROM THE GARDEN!!! I’M YOUR DAD!!! YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME!!!”

And every time, my Grandma, who was not a yeller, and not an angry person would yell back at my dad “HEY! THAT IS MY GARDEN!!! AND I SAY HE CAN EAT AS MUCH HEALTHY FRUITS AND VEGITABLES AS HE WANTS!!! I’M YOUR MOM!!! YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME!!!”

It was more in a mocking him sense, for being so angry over something so stupid. Oh no, a growing boy wants to eat healthy vegitables! What a tragedy! His logic being that I have to ask permission before eating other peoples food. Which in most contexts makes sense.

Until you realize, my grandma was like 120lbs, and she was growing like 60lbs of food in her garden. She wasn’t shy of saying that every neighborhood kid (which was a lot of kids) and all her grandkids, and her own adult kids were free to eat as much as they wanted, take as much as they wanted home. She enjoyed growing the food, but harvesting it was a chore. Plus, it was meant for all of us anyways, so if we grabed it straight from the vine, that was just free harvesting labor that she didn’t have to do, with the food going to the same place anyways.

When you ate food off her vine, you knew you were at grams house. Most people miss their childhood because they miss a tv show, or a friend group they had, or the freedom of not having bills and responsibility. I miss that garden, and helping my grandma harvest. I was 5 years old, running around, picking beans, and listening to grandma tell her stories of how she met my grandpa, and what life in the 60s was like. Which for the time would be like me today explaining what 2004 was like. The 60s seems like such a culturally distant time ago, but at the time she was talking about this, it was just 20 years prior. I’m getting nostolgic for the 80s, and the 60s, a decade I wasn’t even alive for, because I can vividly remember her telling me what life was like during the civil rights movements of the late 60s. She talked about what my dad was like when he was a kid. She wasn’t afraid to take the piss out of my dad by embarassing him to his son. All while we picked beans, and strawberries, and berries, and her favorite tomatoes.

She LOVED tomatoes. Loved loved loved them. She used to say “I know everyones welcome to my garden, but I might have to start growing more tomatoes, or placing restrictions on them. I don’t know WHAT I’d do if everybody wanted my tomatoes! I can’t get enough of them!”

Which was her polite way of basically doing the whole garden of eden thing, except instead of an apple, she was saying “don’t fucking touch my tomatoes!!!” Which nobody did. Also, nobody was naked.

Then in the mid 90s, she eventually had to admit she could no longer upkeep a 6 bedroom house, and a yard that was meant for kids to play in, when she had no kids. By then I was a teenager, and while I could have played in the sense of sports, my days of egg hunting on easter, and running around in capes, and jumping on trees was behind me. My aunt always said "You know, she held off on selling that house, so you could grow up first. It wouldn’t be fair that all her grandkids EXCEPT you got to enjoy the garden, and that yard (I’m the youngest). Then as time went on, eventually she began complaining about tomatoes around the year 2010. She’d say “Is it too late to go get my garden back? These things are tasteless, and not at all juicy. What am I supposed to do with a dry flavorless red bulb? Can it even be called a tomato??? I’m just going to call it worthless.”

I guess I took a while to get to the point of the point of the tomato in this story, but I’m never going to appologize for rambling on and on about my hero in life. I’ll ramble on and on about her to people who never met her, when I’M 90 years old. I’ll seem crazy, and it’ll just seem like old man rambling crazy talk about tomatoes, and pickling jars, and tree forts, and easter egg hunts with 1000 easter eggs for a group of 20 kids.

I’ll seem crazy, but oh well. That’s fine. I miss her, and I miss that time. That’s the biggest part I miss about my childhood. Seeing her happy with a tomato in her hand, and a big straw hat on sunny days, yelling at my dad to calm the fuck down. Nicest woman in the world. Loved you with all her heart. She’d help you with her last dollar if you were in need. But she wouldn’t take shit. When my dad tried to bully control of the conversation, she took him down a peg everytime. And because everyone, him included, respected her, she could do it at any time. The strongest person in the room doesn’t need to yell. They can control an entire room with a whisper. Make you shut up, just so you can hear them by quieting the room, and making you follow their lead. Yelling just proves you have no control of any situation. Gram taught me that everytime my dad would yell, and she would calm him down to a whisper without so much as raising her tone. THAT’S what being a strong person is. Being kind by nature, but tough by force.

rolls eyes

I thought the whole point of the fediverse was that it doesn’t matter which service you use, just as long as you’re in the pool.

It was a mass drone strike, and it affected 3 people total? Did it mostly miss, or am I misunderstanding the term “mass”?

I’m the kind of person who obsesses over details like this. Now, in reality, I know it’s just a silly little joke in a silly comic.

On a deeper level, maybe the artist wasn’t confident in their own ability to draw a prison, and have the reader understand. Even though I think it’s blatently obvious even without that part.

But the REAL fun begins when you try to explain that detail from within the context of the story world they live in.

I like to think there was a time when they were building this prison that construction workers kept getting asked what they were building. It looked huge, and they thought “oh, maybe it’s a MASSIVE library! Look how big the foundation alone is! They could make it 20 floors tall, and have specialized departments of learning.”

And another person asked if it would be a multiplex cinema with 40 screens.

Someone else asked if it would be a hospital.

Then another guy asked how to get to main st. He was just passing through town, and got lost.

Still though, it began interupting their day so often that they put up that sign as they built it. Then when they were done, the state wouldn’t pay anything extra to remove the sign, and so it stayed up after completion.

This construction crew is the only one in town. And so they did this on every building they build. Just down the road is a modernized McDonalds. The grey buildings that don’t look like anything. In the front, in addition to the company provided logo and signage, is also “This is a McDonalds” on the side that faces the road.

This is how my brain is. Creating little backstories for mundane details, that I know aren’t true. Sometimes I’ll see a penny on the ground. “I wonder how this got here…”

Step 1 - burn the house down with gasoline.

There is no step 2.

Now whenever you cook, no matter what you do, no matter how badly you fail, it’ll never be as bad as the time yoj caused a house fire, which resulted in several houses catching fire.

That wasn’t autotune. That’s just what older robots sound like.

Ultima Online?

burns that pile of tinder you call a home go the ground

15 years ago, was the early days of twitter, the dying days of myspace, and the point where facebook first became dominant.

You talking about one of those? Because zero chance your myspace are still up.

And facebook/twitter? Ew.

…no no no no…you’re making it even MORE complicated!!!

screams wildly into pillows

Man…I’m just sooooo SO pissed off at language. In the 90s, I loved calling the current decade “the 90s”. Then 2000 came, and people were like “It’s the aughts!” to which I said “NO! FUCK YOU! I HATE IT, AND YOU SHOULD BURN IN A POOL OF NAPALM FOR EVEN SUGGESTING THAT!!!”

That being said 2000-2010 and 2010-2020 don’t have a cool term for either of their respective decade names. So for 20 years I’ve been saying “OH MAN!!! I CAN’T WAIT UNTIL 2020 WHEN WE CAN END THIS MADNESS, AND CALL IT THE 20s AGAIN!!!”

Imagine my disappointment. Waiting 20 years for the year 2020 to arrive, excited to see what 2020 would bring. And then…2020 happened. Now, if you forget what happened that year, that would be a result of the covid affecting your brain, and also your psyche trying to mentally block out images of horror. It’s something that brains do when faced with intense psychological horror. Which is exactly how I would describe 2020. Imagine waiting 20 years, and THAT’S what you get.

Fuck

Earth.

My brain hurts. I’ve just spent like 3 minutes stating how the “and” isn’t something I ever heard before. Then I said how it goes all the way to 2019. Then I remembered I don’t remember anyone calling it Two Thousand Nineteen. It’s Twenty Nineteen. But 2011 is Two Thousand Elevin, but I HAVE heard Twenty Elevin. And same with 2010.

So now it becomes a matter of geolocation region preferences. Different people switched over at different times. And I am NOT about to go spend my time researching thousands of different data points of who says what and when.

screams into a pillow

This guy’s going around printing vanity username T-Shirts over here! Hey, do you have one for my son? His name is Bort.

That’s both depressing, and correct.

I needed to scroll 1 line to see the punchlinene. In the time after I saw 31:91OM, but before I saw the punchline, is it bad that my first instinct was to hold my phone upside down to see if I could solve the riddle by seeing something hidden in plain sight?

This is our government. This is our government because people voted for these people over other people. People chose this over other options.

Which is why I freely tell people I’m surrounded by morons. Morons everywhere in this country. All around.

So people reply to that with “have you ever considered that YOU’RE the common denominator? All of society can’t be all wrong!”.

When they say that I just say “Thanks for self identifying as part of the moron herd.”

Because yes, if one person is wrong, and everybody plays follow the leader, then EVERYBODY is wrong together.

Right now, roughly 52% of the country is wrong together, but I’d say closer to 90% of the country are just in general morons.

I’m sorry, no. The point when you find yourself relating to libertarians is the time you should really ask yourself two simple questions

1 - Am I a dumbass?

2 - Why am I trying to herd myself in with a group of dumbasses?

Soooooooo…what happens whenever X eventually dies? Does Bluesky just defederate, and say “Haha! It is I who has the most audience, therefore I who dictate the industry!”

Hot or not was a thing until friendster was a thing.

Friendster was a thing, until myspace was a thing.

Myspace was a thing until facebook was a thing.

We’ve seen this line of ups and downs before. Eventually Twitter will be replaced. And then the new thing will be around. As of right now, Bluesky is “federated”, but it REALLY feels like they don’t want to be. Drop of a hat, and they’re defederated. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t see it.

I want you to imagine signing up for a service that has extroplatratinated defubulinators. And everybody on the service is taking full advantage of it. But you haven’t signed up yet, so your defubulinator needs to be created and calibrated before you can gain anything from it. Now imagine if you had no idea what extroplatratinated defubulinators even were, and you weren’t being given any indication what they do, or how to use them. Imagine you had no idea what I was even talking about. And imagine what you would do if search engines wouldn’t help you figure it out. But here I am, ranting and raving about how much better it is for you than traditional methods. But you couldn’t find ANYONE who used it, or knew what I was talking about either.

So now you just keep living life. Never again taking what I said serious.