Not be confused with Pluto: A Star Wars Story (which never released to public, but it was better than Solo: A Star Wars Story).

Anyway, it's in the middle of the morning where I am and I feel somewhat bored.

Anyone else awake with me?

I was digging through the ditches,

and ants are in my britches,

but now from the back

I bring a Mod you like.

The rail companies are were clearly the "bad guys" and it was plain cut story about labor. Striking workers said this was gonna happen, and then it happened and the media did everything it could to cover the Rail-baron's asses. It was failure of regulation, a product of American lobbying also known as corruption in the rest of the world. It was just everything wrong with American industry and the media just did everything it could to get everyone to shut the fuck up about it.

It's just one of those stories I don't think got enough conversation, coverage, and discourse. It was just plainly everything wrong with America resulting in literal death shroud over a working class community. Don't forget the lasting ecological impact of all the plants and animals that drink the water or share the life-force that was injected with death shroud chemicals. Also this was all totally avoidable if they stock buying back vampires just spent like .5% of their revenue to just update some of their hardware. Also the absolute pittance they offered the citizens of East Palestine should have have some [REDACTED] happen.

The whole thing just shows the necrotic rot of capital in the modern age. The zombie looking CEOs just did the bare minimum and gave the smallest concession they could have avoid this and keep their money train going. It wasn't quite panama papers level but goddamn why did we stop talking about this catastrophic failure? The media probably realized all of this is neoliberalism made manifest. From top to bottom. The US department of transportation should have had done a Perp walk on these CEOs. Fuck this whole thing just makes mad. We all deserve so much better.

(BTW I'm pro-train, pro-rail, pro-worker, pro-regulation, all that jazz. I'm just mad that some really real shit happened and America just shrugged and moved on)

The Wikipedia entry is surprisingly pretty decent.

Context is that I am a 30 year old living in a rural area in the south, so my peers are mostly the offspring of HVAC-business-owning yeoman reactionaries or the mentally traumatized wastrels of declining capitalism. It's not a good environment tbh.

I have some irl friends, who are generally cool (by cool I mean a bunch of them are gay and/or trans people who are smart and funny) but they are also 30s range so most of them are just trying to white-knuckle their way through it right now. I feel for them, I do my best to always help and be available for them when they need someone to drive away the encroaching existential misery, but I'm a manchild pursuing the arts to secure a wealthy patron so my life is just so different from theirs and everyone is aware of it. I've fallen into a sort of "therapist" role among my friends, and it gets really exhausting even though I'd never hold it against them.

In the last few months I've noticed that I've been craving some more casual, friendly online interaction. I tried to thrust myself into some online communities on places like discord, and it worked a little, but it was pretty clear most of these places were full of people a decade younger than myself. Am I just gonna have to face the fact that I'm just an atomized mote of consciousness forever and just stop looking for new tribes to join entirely?

EDIT: Also, almost a different question entirely, but why does it seem like there are SO MANY gay Nazis on discord? Because I have a lot of experience being cool around LGBTQ, I have been invited into a few "secret clubs" and holy shit like 1 out of 3 times it's full of extremely gay Nazis practicing their mental gymnastics with each other

I mean, actually my favorite federated instance is probably lemmygrad or startrek.website, but it's really funny wandering into a lemmy.ml community. They've got ALL the reddit liberals, but their mods all agree with us. So it'll just be threads and threads of hexbears eviscerating racists/homophobes/transphobes and by the time I read it, all of the non-hexbeart comments are removed by mod

like this thread https://hexbear.net/post/403920?scrollToComments=false

Maybe it's just a subjective thing from my own limited perspective, but I believe it anyway: with federated liberals showing up and really giving us something to dunk and clown on and generally to identify against, I haven't seen an in-house Hexbear struggle session and I haven't even had anyone get weird on me in direct messages, make several "not an alt" alt accounts to scream at me for a few hours/days, or anything like that since the federating happened.

In that way, indirectly and unintentionally, I'm happy that federating made Hexbears come together and be a bit less shitty.

I'd have assumed, even as insufferable liberals, that they'd be diverse enough to at least argue with some variety from one federated liberal to another, but so far not seeing much of that.

It's weird shit too, like the preoccupation with passive-aggressively saying "kindly" while insulting people too left for them. I've seen it from three different federated liberals today, alone. Is it some kind of "BioShock had such le epic quotable lines and the blue curtains were awesome, dae 'would you kindly'" thing?

You might have heard that private college scholarships are not as great as they seem because many schools will require that they be reported and will then just reduce the student's aid package by the same amount as the scholarship. I have an offspring about to enter freshman year, got a story like that except actually it's worse.

They have this 3k private scholarship, but it came with a couple conditions: the money must be transferred directly to the school and cannot leave its system, I assume to prevent it from being spent on anything fun, and it expires after 1 year, anything remaining is returned to the board. They're attending the University of Texas, a school where less than 20% of students stay in the dorms because they're ridiculously expensive and there aren't nearly enough of them, and since we didn't think to apply for housing back in like February my kid didn't even have that option. They ended up landing in a non affiliated coop with its own meal program, aren't paying tuition the first year due to another award, so all they were planning to spend to the school this year was for fees and books. As it turns out, nearly all of the money from this scholarship just ended up displacing grants that come with no conditions, which could have been used to pay for rent and gas, buy marijuanas etc.

So I guess the correct course of action would have been to retroactively decline the scholarship before the money hit the school, but we didn't have the information required to make that decision, even theoretically, until about a month before everything was doled out, and that's supposing we actually knew the rules they use when re-computing the aid package which I don't believe is published anywhere and even after several calls to financial aid we didn't get until 1 week ago, it's like getting blood from a stone, and honestly I didn't have any inkling that accepting a scholarship could actually hurt you financially so it didn't even occur to either of us to press them harder for the information.

Anyway at least I'm glad my kid has learned this lesson early, that life is actually an incredibly intricate yet boring game of spreadsheets where you have to wait on hold for 3 hours and then roll a 20 to learn the formula used to populate each cell. On an unrelated note, does anyone know where I could offload around 150 hook-em horns T-shirts size XXL to XXXXL?

I assumed it was just "hire more LGBTQIA+ prison guards!"

It's worse than that. What I've seen recently because of federation is "(verbal performative) support for disadvantaged people as long as they maintain a successful small business in a disadvantaged area for no less than three years and aren't anywhere to the left of Bernie Sanders!"

🍷 🍷

My cat died today. Early in the morning he started yelling in pain and then we noticed he was breathing heavily. We immediately took him to an emergency vet. While he was there, he stopped being able to breathe without assistance. Congenital heart failure. We decided to have him put down peacefully. I know he was sedated, but watching him choke on the fluid in his lungs broke me. Pink fluid slowly pulsed into his breathing tube as he left this world.

He was my best friend. We've got four cats and he was the best friend of the other three. He never hissed. He never growled. I loved him so much and I feel so empty without him around. His favorite thing to do was to slam his body into your legs to show his affection. When all the other cats were asleep in other rooms, he'd come up on the couch and cuddle with me. One of our other cats is disabled and he always made sure she was clean and warm. One of the other cats is afraid to eat alone, but he always made sure to stand right next to her at breakfast and dinner time until she was done.

No one has to respond to this, I just needed to write out why he was so lovely. There was no creature in this world as pure as him. He was such a good boy and I love him and I miss him and I don't know what I'm going to do other than roll up into a ball and cry with my partner.

Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba seems to be the best book of the year that I'm reading now. It's great! I just hope that more people read it and get involved in actual activism and organizing. Also, I like how it talks about how there were always activists and organizers fighting for justice and all that, for socialism and for social equity. And how the book tells the difference between "activism" and "organizing." Plus, it brought up how the "intel" agencies of the powerful are also saying that the tide is in our favor as far as social movements go.

Really, if you're an organizer or an activist, read this book.

If you're in an org (basically an activist), read this book.

If you want to get involved, read this book.

Apart from one brand specific to it coming up I cannot find anything useful online, damn the death of search engines. I ordered normal roller blinds because I haven't found any advertised as from bottom up, but I'd like to mount them to start from the bottom. Anyone knows if this will work?

Why? I have windows that are literally what is normally put in as balcony doors. I need to cover the bottom part for privacy because I live in what is essentially a terrarium. But I love sun and the sight of trees so I'd like to leave the top part uncovered without mounting the blinds 2/3rd into the window.

I will greatly appreciate help. Please, no videos, I'm nearly out of Internet. :(

You can use https://browse.feddit.de/ to see all communities, then put them into search on hexbear and once you do, we will be opted in. I have 1.7GB left. I don't think I've much time left, so, if I run out, it's been nice knowing you.

I'm a nudist my entire life. If I can be clothing free, I prefer it, it feels better and doesn't cause any overstimulation (I'm neurospicy). I'm currently stuck without any blinds for my windows, but I've just ordered them! I'll need a manly man (or a manly woman) to hang them for me, because I'm short and tool-less, but once it is done, I may roam my 20 square meters premises free of the systematic cloth oppression! :D

🎸 in this thread we tag some good and/or funny Hexbear usernames

@GayTuckerCarlson@hexbear.net is one that always makes me chuckle

Please let me know if this community is not the best place for this post.

When I was a teenager, and even in my twenties, I used to be quite idealistic, naive, and somewhat radical, believing that all humans have the capacity to be good, and that the only thing preventing utopia where all live in abundance were the historical shackles of national/cultural/religious identities. As in, humans would for sure all get along, if only there were no major reasons for any "us vs them" type thinking.

But the older I get, the more my thoughts on the topic have shifted. My idealism has constantly been worn down by finding out about more and more people who would be happy to fuck over every single other person on this planet if it meant they could get a bit further "ahead" than everybody else. But even on a much smaller scale, after establishing my own family and building my home, at some point I realised that I would personally also be willing to go to extreme lengths if necessary to protect the way of life of my loved ones, including picking up a gun if our neighbouring country decides we should no longer have our freedom - this is something I would have considered "idiotic patriotism" when I was younger. Basically, this means I would also be willing to fuck up the lives of others in order to improve the lives of my family, and I think the same is true for most people.

What I'm getting at is that I think there are lots of reasons that people can have to hurt other humans, ranging from psychotic greed to a strong commitment to close ones. I think this is just human nature. I'm using the word "hurt" here in a very broad sense, including taking advantage of somebody, etc.

If indeed this is human nature, and humans are willing to exploit others to try and improve the situation for themselves and their loved ones, how can communism work? Would we not need to "evolve" to a new stage of humanity first, where people are capable of putting the needs of society above their own desires?

I apologise if this is a dumb question with some obvious answer, I admit I have not read any books on communism and am probably missing some key points.