We need to put Trump's name on this.
if ever anything I wrote were to ever go viral, let it be this. Let everyone talk about the Trump Slump. I want to hear this term in the news.
"ohh my god you can't just-"
Am I yours to command? Does the collar 'round my neck have your name on it? I kneel to no king nor god, and I see no crown on you.
you wear a collar
I may choose to kneel recreationally.
Thought it would be interesting to put down my findings on Dancing Green and all his 70's/80's disco references found within his mechanic names, either from the song titles themselves or from the lyrics within these really iconic songs of the era!
Disco Infernal, gives the debuff Burn Baby Burn > Disco Inferno - The Trammps (1976) Do the Hustle > The Hustle - Van McCoy (1975) Celebrate Good Times > Celebration - Kool & The Gang (1980) Arcady Night Fever > Night Fever - Bee Gees (1977)
Inside Out > Upside Down - Diana Ross (1980) Get Down > Get Down Tonight - KC & The Sunshine Band (1975)
Hi-NRG Fever for the Savage enrage, pronounced High Energy, is a genre of late 70's to early 80's disco, primarily leaning into more electronic styles, which works well with the type of disco music you hear in the raid music itself! Eighth Beats & Quarter Beats are the commonly heard drum beats used in a lot of Disco music! Deep Cut, used for the tankbusters, is a term given to less commonly heard music on a band's popular album but in itself is considered a fave among the fans!
There's some moves that are legit just referencing record players which makes me smile (Drop the Needle and Flip to A-Side which goes into cleaves called Play A-Side).
Honestly it's so nice the amount of attention and love they put into these raids, especially M5 and how much disco it shows in every little part!
Because we don't teach history right.
We teach history like it's a work of fiction where the characters act the way they do because they were written that way. And not like the real world with real people who were just as human as us and had reasons to act the way they do. And that the same mistakes and foibles they had could happen to us too.
And even this history is woefully undertaught. People learn it to memorize the events of the story and then forget about it. They don't learn to comprehend it, they don't learn to learn from it.
This will be a long story, but settle in, because this is important.
I was fortunate enough to have some great teachers growing up, in a small, fairly well-funded school system (and during times when everyone still agreed that fascism was bad). In 8th grade, our school had an interdisciplinary unit for about a month focusing solely on the Holocaust. Every class taught something related to it, even math. For a month, we read horrifying stories and watched documentaries and did research assignments on the Holocaust. By the end, any one of us would have said we were experts on the subject.
And at the very end, our entire grade (about 100 kids) was broken into four groups, and we were told that as a reward for all our hard work on the Holocaust unit, we were going to compete for a trip to Disney World. Only one team could go, but the entire team would get to travel there and spend a few days in the park, all expenses paid.
The competition was simple: the group with the most team spirit would win. We were instructed to come up with a team name, a catchy slogan, and a logo (something simple and easy to draw). We were allowed to prove our team spirit however we wanted. That was it. That was all of the instructions. The competition would last a week, and short of stopping physical violence, the teachers stepped back and let us have at it.
It was terrifying.
At first, everyone just hung up posters in the halls and cheerfully recited their slogan whenever the teachers were watching. Within a few days, posters were being torn down and shredded. Verbal fights were breaking out in the hallways. It wasn't enough to say your team was the best, everyone had somehow decided. You also had to prove that everyone else's team was inferior. People started making up lies and gossip, saying that everyone in a particular group was lazy or ugly or smelly or what have you (we were 13). Slurs were thrown around. (Again, we were 13.)
By the final day, the groups were marching down the halls in formation, shouting their slogan in unison. Shouting slander against the other groups. The floor was covered in tattered paper.
I was shy and introverted and weird and unpopular and mostly stayed out of it. But those images are burned into my memory. These kids had turned into vicious monsters, all for a stupid school project.
The teachers had us march down the hallway to the auditorium to announce the results of the competition. The groups were little armies now. Most students marched in lockstep, shouting their slogans. We were seated together in our groups. The teachers dimmed the lights, quieted us down, and the teacher in charge of this whole project said that before he announced the winners, he had something to share with us about the person who was responsible for this entire competition. He turned on the projector and displayed a portrait of Hitler.
Everyone lost their minds. Kids were booing and throwing things. We knew that Hitler was a Bad Guy.
The teacher calmed us back down, and then explained that there was no trip to Disney World, and the fact that not one student questioned for a moment that such a massively expensive and complicated prize would be granted for such a silly competition was honestly kind of disappointing. This entire week, he said, was our final exam. The final exam for the Holocaust unit.
We had spent a month learning about this. About how this "bad guy" inspired a whole hell of a lot of people to march in lockstep shouting slogans and plastering their symbol all over everything. That one bad guy had told them that they were special, and other groups were trying to take away what was rightfully theirs for being the best, and they ultimately got extremely violent. We had learned all about the Hitler Youth and the SS and book burnings and, of course, the concentration camps. We'd all read the Diary of Anne Frank. We'd been marinating in this information for a month, in all of our classes.
But we hadn't learned. We hadn't really understood what they were trying to teach us. Not that this happened. But that this happens. It can happen very easily, especially if people aren't watching out for it.
The kids were furious. They shouted that this wasn't fair, that we were only following instructions. The teachers had lied to us. They had told us to do this, and now they were mad at us for following directions?
He was ready for this, of course. Calming us back down again, he pointed out that all they'd done is tell us to give ourselves a name, a slogan, a symbol, and demonstrate "team spirit." That was literally it. No one told us to rip posters down. No one told us to march in the hallways. No one told us to spread rumors and shout insults. No one told us to fight each other.
They didn't have to.
All it takes to get people to behave this way is to tell them that their group is special, they deserve good things, but the good things aren't there because those other people are taking them from you.
The Nazis were not uniquely evil people. They were just encouraged to demonstrate their team spirit. And there were no teachers to stop it from getting violent. Because the person encouraging them wanted things to get violent.
The Holocaust was not the story of Hitler the Bad Guy. He was there, and he was responsible for a lot, but that wasn't the point. Germany during the Holocaust wasn't suddenly, by total accident, full of evil people.
It was just full of people like us.
This time, it just was a lie about Disney World and a week of chaos. But if we didn't watch out, the next time fascism started to rise, we would get swept up on the wrong side of it. We had just proven that we would. We'd be too swept up in making sure that our special group got the prize they deserved to notice that we were being lied to about the prize in the first place.
That could happen. If we weren't careful. If we forgot the lesson we'd just learned.
After he'd let the horror and shame and embarrassment and indignation of that week sink in properly, he reassured us that it wasn't our fault. The point wasn't for us to prove that we understood the lesson of the Holocaust. It wasn't actually a test after all, it was our final lesson. The most important lesson.
He'd known that this test would go this way, because it always did. He did this every year. He said in all his years of teaching, only one student, one student, had ever questioned it. Pulled him aside in the hallway and said straightforwardly that whatever was going on was messed up and he wanted no part of it.
And you know what? That is how you teach history. You give students the facts of what happened. And then you show them how easily it can happen again.
Sadly, most schools don't have the resources for this sort of thing, and these days they'd probably not be allowed to run this little experiment. But I'm extremely grateful to that teacher, grateful that I was part of that experience. It was harrowing, and it made me and a lot of other people vigilant for the rest of my life in a way I know I would not have been otherwise.
It was over 35 years ago now and it still makes me emotional to think about.
Most people never got to have that experience, to properly learn that lesson. But at least I can pass the story on to you. And you can pass it on to others. Because if you think you would have acted differently, that you would have seen through the ruse, think again.
Teaching history requires such a broad high level picture of trends and an up close look at specific events and the ability to weave the two together that it’s no wonder we come up short.
The biggest misconception in public schools is that literary analysis is about proving you can be right or wrong about a book you read
Literary analysis isn’t about the book
It’s not even about being right
It’s about performing an investigation and presenting your case to the jury
It doesn’t matter if your defendant killed that guy or not. If you can convince the jury he didn’t, you’ve won
And the incredible life skill of spinning bulletproof bullshit out your ass with a handful of facts and a prayer is soooooooo much more valuable than anyone’s ever gonna tell you
Schwarzenegger winning seemed like the most embarrassing thing that would ever happen in politics at the time and now he’s to the left of every elected Republican and a few Democrats and just makes videos going “young men, my fadda was a Nazi and he was a contemptible loosah”
The Exarch was then carried off into the sunset and never seen again.
5 years ago, I was in Rehab.
10 years ago, I was watching my Potential and Opportunities dissolve and evaporate in an ocean of cheap gin and expensive whiskey.
But 5 years ago, I was in Rehab.
One of the exercises they had us perform was to imagine ourselves happy, 5 years in the future.
Many of us in that room had forgotten how to imagine nice things happening to them. A few snorted (well, I snorted), finding the notion that we’d even still be around in 5 years grimly humorous.
For about half of us, it was the last stop on the way down.
But I indulged the therapist. I was there, after all, because I did not want to die. So, I imagined myself, 5 years hence.
Happy.
It came to me all at once; an artistic remix on Norman Rockwell’s Freedom From Want, reframed with myself placing food at the table.
Sunday Dinner At My Place, I answered, when it came my turn to share my fantasy. I was asked what food I imagined eating.
It’s not the meal itself, I said, it’s the implications framed around it. Sunday Dinner At My Place means that I have a Place. It means that I have Family that will actually speak to me and friends who actually want to see me. It means money enough not just to feed myself but others too. It means having the time to spare to take the time preparing the meal.
A lot of nodding heads all around me. A struck chord. Many people with no Place, in that place. Nowhere that would lament their leaving.
5 years hence, as I lay down to sleep in my Home, with my Wife and my Son, surrounded by my Art and my Flowers, I reflect.
It was a long road. It was hard. We lost people. So many people. There were long days and long nights and hospital stays. Angry arguments with ghosts. I changed, in ways I never hoped for, or expected. Good ways, finally, for once. Slowly, against the backdrop of a world in chaos, I found my mind.
Sometimes, My Wife wondered aloud, what she did to deserve me. After some stumbling with my feelings, I eventually settled on an answer.
I’m a Rescue.
She gave me a Home.
And, so, I gave her a Family.
It seemed fair
This Sunday, my folks, which whom I have not had a shouting match in years, will come over for dinner. We will cook and eat together. My Friend became My Wife, and she took a piece of me and with it she made Our Son. There will be many hugs, and no violence. Good Things Happened.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you don’t know what the future holds.
It could get good, even.
If uppercase letters are capital letters then what the FUCK are lowercase letters
Literally lower case, fortunately!
BUT WHAT WERE THEY CALLED TO DISTINGUISH THEM FROM CAPITALS PRIOR TO THE CASE
ooh ok I know this one, the technical terms for upper and lower case letters are majuscule and minuscule, which goes all the way back to when they were essentially two different latin alphabets that were not combined together in written text in the way we do now. there's actually no specific opposite term to capital that applies to minuscule letters.
however... since capital comes from the latin caput meaning head because capitals are used at the head of a sentence or page, if we wanted to have an opposite term for lower case letters we could take it from the latin word for body, corpus. therefore, something like "corpusal letters" maybe?
So I had a funny dream the other night.
It involved a very gay witch.
Okay okay okay so I’m changing like every recognizable detail of this for privacy purposes but yall need to appreciate this
So I know how to retain CCTV footage, right? It doesn’t come up everywhere but I know my way around- and if someone gets jumped in a parking lot or whatever I can go backwards and see whodunnit
So I’m at this one place, right? And I get a call that an older woman in a wheelchair got hurt somehow and we need to see what happened.
Nobody remembers the exact time, because of course not, but they tell me she was wearing like a massive hot pink jacket and she’s in a wheelchair and she left with a medic round 09:45ish, so I figure I’ll start there.
So I find the incident itself no problem, but they need ALL footage for liability and insurance and stuff, so I have to keep going
And about ten minutes backwards, I lose her. She comes into view past a single shelf on one of the worse cameras and vanishes.
like. VANISHES. Hot pink jacket, big bulky black chair, gonzo. No idea where she came from.
So, I pull up entry cams. Zoom backwards till I see her come in… at like 06:15.
THREE AND A HALF HOURS EARLIER.
So first off, this is gonna take me like two hours minimum to write down, forget retention. And I’m kind of dying in my soul a bit but I start over there, watching her come in and meander and whatever.
At about 08:30ish she disappears.
Doesn’t leave. Doesn’t head to a bathroom. Doesn’t take her coat off. Her trail just stops.
Now, I’ve done this before. Typically, a location only has the mandatory minimum amount of room for a chair or walker to get around, so a person using one can only go forwards and it’s hard to 180. That limits options and makes it easier to follow, whereas a little unattended and fully mobile kid will zoom around in circles and shit and go who the hell knows where.
Then I see her again on the other ass end of the building, and I have to go back again to see how she GOT there.
My guys.
Her two and three-point turns are INCREDIBLE.
She’s popping on the wheels, flip, zoom, she’s out somewhere I didn’t think she could even GET to. I’ve been planning my search for places that fit a wheelchair or least-resistance fast-paths from A to B and she’s like… doing some Tokyo Drift shit.
I don’t know WHY. The whole place is basically completely accessible so long as you put up with having to reverse, but no. No, she goes where she wants.
I’ve been at this for half the day, and I still have no idea where she went for like an hour and a half.
Fuck me, I’m taking a lunch break
This is barely an exaggeration
