Alison Smaalders
vividwings.bsky.social
Alison Smaalders
@vividwings.bsky.social
410 followers 300 following 1K posts
Archaeology major, currently working in P&C insurance. Gamer, LARPer, general nerd, cat lover. Occasionally known as Fun Fact. She/her.
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Reposted by Alison Smaalders
LEGAL RELEASE FORM: You agree to let us film you
ME: Seems OK
FORM: We own your face forever
ME: Ummm
FORM: We own your face via technologies that haven’t been invented yet
ME:
FORM: in other galaxies
ME: OK hold on
FORM: If we kill you during filming you’re not allowed to scream
Reposted by Alison Smaalders
running for president in '28, my entire campaign is just two posters, one picturing prominent members of the current administration beneath the banner headline "PRISON", and another of all the leading techbros beneath the banner headline 'WE WILL TAKE ALL THEIR MONEY'
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I haven't had the capacity to keep up with moderation lists for a bit, but this one is really obvious, so I'm stealing some energy from Future Me: a list for the extremely obvious wave of inauthentic accounts following today's newly-created US gov accounts

bsky.app/profile/did:...
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Mike Johnson has given the house a very very very very very very very very very long vacation because he’s worried about the Epstein files
WHY DID YOU HAVE TO REMIND ME ABOUT THE SCHOOL BUS the school bus lives rent free in my head forever. I will be mumbling about it in the nursing home.
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Chekhov: if there is a gun on the mantlepiece it must go off in the third act.

T. Kingfisher: if there is a gun on the mantlepiece, the mantlepiece is probably going to try to eat you.
Two books for spooky season:
COFFIN MOON, Keith Rosson: Best modern vampire story ever (although it's set in the 70s).
THE TWISTED ONES, by T. Kingfisher: It lures you in with chatty good humor (especially about NPR Pledge Week) and a lovely dog...then slams the door and bites you in the dark.
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Reposted by Alison Smaalders
Reposted by Alison Smaalders
"How do you expect to win back men...?"

We don't want those men. They are the hot dogs on the floor of humanity and we still have all these nice prepped hamburger patties if someone would just let them cook.
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it always makes me feel like I'm losing my mind whenever some absolute monster says "well ALL men do this evil thing so why are you mad at ME, it's just in our MALE NATURE to be hateful rapist Nazi homophobes" or whatever the thing is

I'm always like, the men around him should feel insulted by that
People act like all the men are gone. The men are attending protests. The men are putting together scooters for their kids. The men are getting a set of turntables for the first time. The men are buying Nikes. The men are getting super into noir. They're not Nazis and they're fine. Keep your freaks.
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Premeditated murder of the American research community. None of this had to happen.
Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs

- Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75%
- Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60%
- Social Sciences by 50–70%
- History by 60%
- Biology by 75%
- The German department will lose all PhD seats
- Sociology from six PhD students to zero
Harvard FAS Cuts Ph.D. Seats By More Than Half Across Next Two Admissions Cycles | News | The Harvard Crimson
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for th...
www.thecrimson.com
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“I was a fool then but I’m not now”

GROWTH
Reminder that Violent J of Insane Clown Posse has the correct response to a lot of the shitty things he said in the early days.
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Every now and then I go back and read the Citizens United ruling to see if it is as unhinged as I thought, and every time I do that I see it is actually far more deranged than I remembered.

levernews.com/book
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Monstrous and inhumane. Our neighbors are being tortured
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the symbolism of “Trump destroying the White House for a overpriced luxury vanity project, during a government shut down, days after a historically-large mass demonstration against his regime called “No Kings”’ would be rightly viewed as laying it on a little thick if it was in a work of fiction
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Actual Voters have takes so much wilder than anyone online could imagine
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‼️ REMOVE AIslop from your PINTEREST results.‼️
Let's see how true this is....

1. Go to ‘Refine your recommendations’ and remove everything related to ‘generative AI interests’.

(As if anyone who visits the site for reliable references would be interested in that...)
Even if this doesn't fix it entirely, any reduction in slop is a win. Thank you for this tip!
This might be worse than the previous winner of "most dangerously enmeshed startup activity and/or 'benefit'" I have seen previously, which was "our yearly team building exercise is that the CEO takes the whole company and their significant others to Burning Man to run a theme camp".
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It really does seem remarkable how often protest activity from the right is treated as the voice of the people and protest from the left no matter how big tends to be questioned and downplayed.
Here's a gift link to the New York Times' coverage of the initial Tea Party rallies in April 2009 which inspired the media to treat it like a massive movement.

Check out how tiny the crowds were:

Philly: 200
DC: "several hundred"
Boston: 500
Austin: 1,000
Houston: 2,000
Tax Day Is Met With Tea Parties (Published 2009)
www.nytimes.com
Silwa seems to engage in good faith- his opinions, however bad, good, or just deeply weird, are his own. He is not tempering them in order to get elected by the current GOP. I think that's why he and Mamdani were way more respectful towards each other during the debate than they were to Cuomo.
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The Calvinist insistence that charity interferes with the predestined choices of God runs very very deep in our culture and is a perennial thwarting force to having nice things
Keynesianism is like Ozempic in that it's something that works but makes people mad because they want moral hazard to be involved
There’s a certain kind of person who thinks Keynesian stimulus is “putting off” a necessary correction and I’m always amazed how many of them there are.
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Reposted by Alison Smaalders
Are we doing "The ACA Sucks" Discourse again?

I'm going to guess most people hating on it from the left have never received a hospital bill the size of book; I put the apple there for scale.

That's the $1.3 million bill my kid incurred in his first ~94 days. Why does that make me respect the ACA?
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Link was one of the early members of Bluesky, he's a lawyer and disability advocate. He pointed out Jay, the CEO of Bluesky was following a noted transphobe and was critical of this. Then he was suspended. When people were like WTF, it was said his ban was due to posting a Charlie Kirk reaction meme
Who is link and why were they banned, I finally gotta ask