I love angering wingnuts by reminding them that only female reindeer have antlers in the winter, so the 9 pullers of Santa's sleigh are then, by definition, lady reindeer. Thank you, Tini, for the adroable gif :)
So if there is there a correlation between the Bering sea drying up and genetic divergence between Caribou and reindeer? Or did the reindeer do flyovers?
The reindeer were introduced to Alaska, along with Eurasian reindeer herders. The idea was to teach the Inuit to herd instead of hunt. It was largely a failure in all the ways you can imagine, but native corporations do still round up reindeer and caribou to cut antlers for traditional Asian medicine and also for meat.
I used to work in a deli with an imported grocery section that sold canned reindeer meatballs from Lapland. Just the thing to put out for snacks at the family Christmas get together.
Maybe put a red clown nose in the middle of the platter.
Hmmmm, I will craft tiny antlers for each meatball, then tell any youngs that ask, "Don't worry, they're only the 𝘣𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘶𝘱 reindeer. Santa's still coming..."
The best review about St. Nicolas and his miracles comes from the fabulous historian at Going Medieval: https://going-medieval.com/2018/12/06/on-st-nicholas/. She has a book which you can buy on Amazon called the Once and Future Sex (please use the Wonkette link!!!). All you Wonkette people would love her, please go see. Spoiler alert: there is a lot of Medieval sex and it is fun
Mediaite's big mad because......uh...*checks notes* CNN aired an ad for the Barbie movie debuting on the MAX streaming app disguised as a commercial? I don't know?..
But I guess it's only OK when Faux Snooze promotes feetball, or that 200 Mules movie.
I haven't gotten all the way through the Hard Times article but the common thread so far seems to be an unwillingness to own up to one's mistakes or bad behavior. It is very hard to say publicly, I was wrong, I"m sorry. But what is the alternative? Continue to throw marginalized people under the bus?
The White House Christmas decorations this year are about as traditionally Christmas as you can get, so most of the right wing outrage is definitely in response to the crime of "black people expressing joy" (and possibly also a gay person participating in the famously straight profession of "Broadway musical chorus dancer"). They just won't say it.
However, I do think Melania's "German Expressionist Christmas Nightmare" would have lent itself well to some Chicago-era Fosse choreography.
Also:
*richard spencer getting punched by antifa dot gif* It's the reason for the season.
no matter how much existential dread trump causes me, i ADORE that melania german expressionist christmas nightmare shit. love love love it. if we could add richard spencer getting punched in the nightmare hallway i would die complete.
(TBF, as a 13 year old, my artistic goal was to play cruella deville...)
A man dressed as a flower? A woman dressed as a toy soldier? Everyone having fun and looking happy? I will not stand for Biden's joyous woke Christmas. /s
Just slogged through that In These Times longread, trying to figure out what my takeaway is. Near the end of the article I had an epiphany that maybe my mom and the hippies were correct. Maybe the best thing to do, when you feel shaken by the ever-shifting bedrock of our dystopian world, is to take your happy ass out into the middle of nowhere and live in a teepee. Or a storage shed. Or a mobile home. Or a McMansion. Like Rick Nelson said, you can't please everyone so you gotta please yourself.
I disagree. We have a duty to try to make things better. I think it’s self-indulgent to just please one’s ownself when things are circling the shithole drain for so many. And eventually someone will come and torch all the teepees. But that’s just me.
Ahh, well (not meaning to be snarky to you, just the situation) both sides are the same. Trying to preserve rights is equivalent to trying to take them away. Just a difference of opinion.
From my perspective, the hippies who choose to live close to the land and ignore our broken society are just leading by example. Nobody's coming to torch our mobile homes.
There's a piece out on "misogynists make good informants" which builds upon this premise, specifically on the problem of gender violence on the left enabling state violence, but you can see how the same tendencies in people-- and encountering pushback which their egos cannot handle, but which they deserve-- lead them to espouse unstable right-wing positions. They want to be right and they want to never be challenged.
Totally. I wanted this article to speak to me, to give me some fat to chew on while I contemplate my future as a disaffected leftist redneck. Your one-sentence noncomment makes more sense than that 5,000 word article.
As a tap dancer, I have to wonder if those dancers were allowed to wear their taps on the White House floors or if the sounds were added in post. The White House has people in charge of those floors and they don't want tap scratches all over them.
My tap class got kicked out of the Michael Landon Center in Malibu when they installed new flooring. We now dance in city hall in the room used for city council meetings. Nobody cares about that floor.
They used to do that in movie musicals - edit in the taps. In their case, it wasn't because of possible floor damage, it was so they could have dialog and enter and leave the scene without all that tap noise.
That was my IMMEDIATE thought. I work in musical theater and we always have to install special floors on the stage when there's tap. No Way they were allowed to do that on the WH floors.
Might have been mentioned already. Hasbro, who currently owns Wizards of the Coast, the Dungeons and Dragons brand, just laid off 1100 employees, two weeks before Christmas. Not clear if the affected people are getting severance.
The sentiment in much of the gaming community seems to be that because so many of the layoffs were centered around art and design, and because WotC got caught earlier this year using AI generated work in their recent Glory of Giants book, that we're seeing another major company trying to replace staff with AI.
I can't say if that's true. My guess is that this is more likely an attempt to return to profitability after a massive tank of Hasbro stock following the boneheaded maneuver they pulled earlier this year that essentially made all the third party RPG companies go running for the hills, taking the customer bar with them.
Regardless of the reasoning, the layoffs are painful, and the people affected did not deserve to have this happen to them because someone in a cushy office made a total fuckup.
If you work in publishing or the gaming industry, and somehow hadn't heard about this, and you happen to know of any openings in your company, there are a bunch of talented people looking for work right now. Go snap them up!
Our group's GM works for an independent game design company. Our latest session is using a new game system after the licensing mess in the Spring. We stopped using D&D Beyond for on-line gaming. We had been prepping for moving somethings to the new D&D system in a couple of months and now that's all on hold.
I'm trying to convince the crew to move to Pathfinder 2e. We were kind of waiting on the remaster, and for one of the two current campaigns wind down. Stopped buying WotC stuff for now.
I don't care what your financial calendar looks like, if you lay off employees right before the holiday, you should be visited by three ghosts who punch you directly in the junk.
"I can help with drafting in a couple hours," Chesebro replied.
"F— these guys," Roman messaged back.
One aspect of a Day One Dictator endless term that hasn't been given enough attention is #TeamDictator's total scorn for process. They fucked things up last time, and will fuck things up much more-er next time.
Good morning. Well crap, I set the alarm for 5:50, it goes off, I hit "Stop," and as usual I lie there trying to rescue a fragment of dream. This morning's fragment is a mere phrase: "Some city below.."
Then next thing I know, it's 6:38, and I've been sleeping. So now I have to rush. But I'm going to sit here until 7:00 and then rush.
"The expectant crowd watches as three children knock on the door of a local butcher, only to be chopped up into little pieces and left to cure in a salting pot. Falling snowflakes are replaced with chunks of veal."
And y'all are wondering why French cooking is so good.
At a gross food Halloween party 40 years ago someone had a plate with Vienna sausages arranged nicely around the plate with two hazelnuts at the end of each sausage. A nicely lettered card by the plate said “Vienna boys choir. Voices like angels.”
It’s reindeer babies in your hed gif. The feminist agenda is taking over Santa’s sleigh. Expect the usual freakout by insecure wingnuts: https://open.substack.com/pub/martiniambassador/p/santas-eight-tiny-reindeer-probably
I did not realize until I saw this tab just how much I needed BABY REINDEER!!!!!!!!!!
I love angering wingnuts by reminding them that only female reindeer have antlers in the winter, so the 9 pullers of Santa's sleigh are then, by definition, lady reindeer. Thank you, Tini, for the adroable gif :)
Reindeers are better than people.
But people smell better than reindeers.
... except to the reindeer.
Reindeer are Caribou. Is there a Nordic Caribou Barbie?
Reindeer are semi-domesticated. Caribou are fully wild, and are a little larger. My spouse did reindeer/caribou research in Alaska.
So if there is there a correlation between the Bering sea drying up and genetic divergence between Caribou and reindeer? Or did the reindeer do flyovers?
The reindeer were introduced to Alaska, along with Eurasian reindeer herders. The idea was to teach the Inuit to herd instead of hunt. It was largely a failure in all the ways you can imagine, but native corporations do still round up reindeer and caribou to cut antlers for traditional Asian medicine and also for meat.
I used to work in a deli with an imported grocery section that sold canned reindeer meatballs from Lapland. Just the thing to put out for snacks at the family Christmas get together.
Maybe put a red clown nose in the middle of the platter.
Wash it down with reindeer drool. https://michellewong90.wordpress.com/2019/01/24/fava-tea-reindeer-drool/
Hmmmm, I will craft tiny antlers for each meatball, then tell any youngs that ask, "Don't worry, they're only the 𝘣𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘶𝘱 reindeer. Santa's still coming..."
Christmas spirit lives!
“These ones didn’t straighten up and fly right”
"That'll teach them to play reindeer games."
Make it easier to pluck them out of the sauce.
Eating reindeer meatballs doesn't 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 to be such messy business...
I would love to sneak a can into some innocent victim’s Christmas display
Amazon has them canned in gravy, but at $43.00 a kilo and $14.95 shipping they are pricy.
You are evil and I love you.
I have that effect on people.
They'll demand that christmas day be moved.
You spelled it wrong. It's femiNAZI. Everyone knows that.
It's the pelvic thrust that drives the Republicans insane. Let's do the time warp again.
Get well soon. Eat lots of chicken soup.
The best review about St. Nicolas and his miracles comes from the fabulous historian at Going Medieval: https://going-medieval.com/2018/12/06/on-st-nicholas/. She has a book which you can buy on Amazon called the Once and Future Sex (please use the Wonkette link!!!). All you Wonkette people would love her, please go see. Spoiler alert: there is a lot of Medieval sex and it is fun
Say what you will, Melania did a GREAT "White Witch plunges Narnia into 'always winter and never Christmas' nightmare" set dressing.
Mediaite's big mad because......uh...*checks notes* CNN aired an ad for the Barbie movie debuting on the MAX streaming app disguised as a commercial? I don't know?..
But I guess it's only OK when Faux Snooze promotes feetball, or that 200 Mules movie.
https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/cnn-aired-a-blatant-commercial-for-barbies-streaming-debut-disguised-as-a-news-segment/#article-nav
I haven't gotten all the way through the Hard Times article but the common thread so far seems to be an unwillingness to own up to one's mistakes or bad behavior. It is very hard to say publicly, I was wrong, I"m sorry. But what is the alternative? Continue to throw marginalized people under the bus?
The White House Christmas decorations this year are about as traditionally Christmas as you can get, so most of the right wing outrage is definitely in response to the crime of "black people expressing joy" (and possibly also a gay person participating in the famously straight profession of "Broadway musical chorus dancer"). They just won't say it.
However, I do think Melania's "German Expressionist Christmas Nightmare" would have lent itself well to some Chicago-era Fosse choreography.
Also:
*richard spencer getting punched by antifa dot gif* It's the reason for the season.
no matter how much existential dread trump causes me, i ADORE that melania german expressionist christmas nightmare shit. love love love it. if we could add richard spencer getting punched in the nightmare hallway i would die complete.
(TBF, as a 13 year old, my artistic goal was to play cruella deville...)
"*richard spencer getting punched by antifa dot gif*"
I like that we all know the meme videos so much we can just reference them.
Also I'll never get tired of punching nazis:
*richard spencer getting punched by antifa dot gif*
APANITF!
A man dressed as a flower? A woman dressed as a toy soldier? Everyone having fun and looking happy? I will not stand for Biden's joyous woke Christmas. /s
What's next? Leaving out milk and cookies for santa? and carrots for the reindeer?
None of that woke 2% milk either, or Virginia Foxx gon' gitcha.
Mike Johnson: Breathe toxins l̵i̵b̵t̵a̵r̵d̵s̵ Mom and Dad! Good grief, Johnson is a raging case of hemorrhoids.
Just slogged through that In These Times longread, trying to figure out what my takeaway is. Near the end of the article I had an epiphany that maybe my mom and the hippies were correct. Maybe the best thing to do, when you feel shaken by the ever-shifting bedrock of our dystopian world, is to take your happy ass out into the middle of nowhere and live in a teepee. Or a storage shed. Or a mobile home. Or a McMansion. Like Rick Nelson said, you can't please everyone so you gotta please yourself.
I disagree. We have a duty to try to make things better. I think it’s self-indulgent to just please one’s ownself when things are circling the shithole drain for so many. And eventually someone will come and torch all the teepees. But that’s just me.
From that perspective, the disaffected leftists who gravitate to the right are just doing their duties to try and make things better.
Ahh, well (not meaning to be snarky to you, just the situation) both sides are the same. Trying to preserve rights is equivalent to trying to take them away. Just a difference of opinion.
From my perspective, the hippies who choose to live close to the land and ignore our broken society are just leading by example. Nobody's coming to torch our mobile homes.
My take away from it is "these people were looking for an excuse"
There's a piece out on "misogynists make good informants" which builds upon this premise, specifically on the problem of gender violence on the left enabling state violence, but you can see how the same tendencies in people-- and encountering pushback which their egos cannot handle, but which they deserve-- lead them to espouse unstable right-wing positions. They want to be right and they want to never be challenged.
Yeah, there wasn't really much of a tie between the various characters. They're all motivated by different things.
Maybe the take away is to stop assuming that one thing is driving leftists to become conserva-crazy?
Totally. I wanted this article to speak to me, to give me some fat to chew on while I contemplate my future as a disaffected leftist redneck. Your one-sentence noncomment makes more sense than that 5,000 word article.
As a tap dancer, I have to wonder if those dancers were allowed to wear their taps on the White House floors or if the sounds were added in post. The White House has people in charge of those floors and they don't want tap scratches all over them.
My tap class got kicked out of the Michael Landon Center in Malibu when they installed new flooring. We now dance in city hall in the room used for city council meetings. Nobody cares about that floor.
I had the same thought. The taps didn't quite line up with what their feet were doing.
They used to do that in movie musicals - edit in the taps. In their case, it wasn't because of possible floor damage, it was so they could have dialog and enter and leave the scene without all that tap noise.
You're a tap dancer? That's so cool!
I dance many styles, but tap is my favorite.
That was my IMMEDIATE thought. I work in musical theater and we always have to install special floors on the stage when there's tap. No Way they were allowed to do that on the WH floors.
I assumed they laid down fake flooring first.
We used to have a marley floor for tap, but I guess it was expensive.
Well, I am called upon to do some adulting at 10A, so I must begin the readying process...
It seems odd to me, because it happens so seldom. Adulting, I mean...
Might have been mentioned already. Hasbro, who currently owns Wizards of the Coast, the Dungeons and Dragons brand, just laid off 1100 employees, two weeks before Christmas. Not clear if the affected people are getting severance.
The sentiment in much of the gaming community seems to be that because so many of the layoffs were centered around art and design, and because WotC got caught earlier this year using AI generated work in their recent Glory of Giants book, that we're seeing another major company trying to replace staff with AI.
I can't say if that's true. My guess is that this is more likely an attempt to return to profitability after a massive tank of Hasbro stock following the boneheaded maneuver they pulled earlier this year that essentially made all the third party RPG companies go running for the hills, taking the customer bar with them.
Regardless of the reasoning, the layoffs are painful, and the people affected did not deserve to have this happen to them because someone in a cushy office made a total fuckup.
If you work in publishing or the gaming industry, and somehow hadn't heard about this, and you happen to know of any openings in your company, there are a bunch of talented people looking for work right now. Go snap them up!
Our group's GM works for an independent game design company. Our latest session is using a new game system after the licensing mess in the Spring. We stopped using D&D Beyond for on-line gaming. We had been prepping for moving somethings to the new D&D system in a couple of months and now that's all on hold.
I'm trying to convince the crew to move to Pathfinder 2e. We were kind of waiting on the remaster, and for one of the two current campaigns wind down. Stopped buying WotC stuff for now.
MBAs embrace "creative destruction!" Creative construction not so much. Too hard, didn't read.
I don't care what your financial calendar looks like, if you lay off employees right before the holiday, you should be visited by three ghosts who punch you directly in the junk.
I'm still shaking me head over the stupid decision to run off third party companies.
"I can help with drafting in a couple hours," Chesebro replied.
"F— these guys," Roman messaged back.
One aspect of a Day One Dictator endless term that hasn't been given enough attention is #TeamDictator's total scorn for process. They fucked things up last time, and will fuck things up much more-er next time.
Or their scorn for the rubes they talked into doing their bidding.
Good morning. Well crap, I set the alarm for 5:50, it goes off, I hit "Stop," and as usual I lie there trying to rescue a fragment of dream. This morning's fragment is a mere phrase: "Some city below.."
Then next thing I know, it's 6:38, and I've been sleeping. So now I have to rush. But I'm going to sit here until 7:00 and then rush.
Cuz this day is shaping up to be some city below.
Good morning to you.
"The expectant crowd watches as three children knock on the door of a local butcher, only to be chopped up into little pieces and left to cure in a salting pot. Falling snowflakes are replaced with chunks of veal."
And y'all are wondering why French cooking is so good.
At a gross food Halloween party 40 years ago someone had a plate with Vienna sausages arranged nicely around the plate with two hazelnuts at the end of each sausage. A nicely lettered card by the plate said “Vienna boys choir. Voices like angels.”
Every one of my friends (and I) call short vienna sausages "little boys"
Yikes. My upvote here is not exactly a "like."