I sent a text to friends this morning & some asked me to share more widely, so here it is 🧵:

I woke up just feeling like he doesn’t get to take anything more from me than he’s going to take no matter what I do. If he kills us all, then I die. But he doesn’t get my mind too. He doesn’t get to make my life less enjoyable.

I control what I control, not him, and I control whether or not I spend the one life I have freaking out about him.

It's September in Southern California, which means it's time for the annual Spider Simp Thread!

No photos, don't worry, just information on why you're seeing more, bigger spiders this month and what to do to avoid a face full of spiderweb without harming lovely mosquito eaters. First, Giant Face Hug Spiderwebs: elaborate webs stretching across sidewalks or even whole streets will become more common this month through October/November.

These are the work of orb weavers! They've always been around, they're just at their largest in the fall.

Hi! Heat wave picketers, would you like some tips on increasing your heat tolerance?

I'm an endurance rider, which means I do a sport that requires me to sometimes exercise in up to 120-degree temperatures for hours at a time.

Heat tolerance is not fixed—you can build it. First rule of heat training is: NEVER PUSH IT.

I'm serious. Do NOT get heatstroke. It will take away all your hard work building heat tolerance and make it easier to get heatstroke again in the future.

If you feel overheated, even if you've been outside for 30 seconds, cool off

The biggest “they hate us cause they ain’t us” arc of my lifetime

The obscenely rich can have anything they desire… except creativity and imagination.

So they attack it. If they can’t have it, it must be worthless. Like a street harasser screaming “You’re ugly anyway!”

https://twitter.com/Passionweiss/status/1653277082955436032

Once upon a time, a friend got a job working for someone who makes an amount of money my mind can’t fathom, doing a job in the entertainment industry that many aspire to.

She passed his desk one day to find he’d left the screenplay he was working on open on his desktop.

wild how the percentage of workers belonging to a union peaked in 1954 at 35%

and 1954 is the "golden age of the vibrant, thriving middle class" that everyone yearns for

but nobody yearning for the golden age of the vibrant, thriving middle class is proposing more unions NOSTALGIC POLITICIAN: we need to go back to 1954 to save the middle class

MILLENNIALS: neat! by getting 35% of American workers into strong labor unions, right?

POLITICIAN: not that part

MILLENNIALS: so what part then?

POLITICIAN: I was thinking racism and housewives

God, he's just such a basic fucking model of "dad whose kids don't like him."

No features. No bells and whistles. Not even power windows. Just an absolute, off the lot, take it or leave it, as-is crappy dad. Men will literally buy Twitter, unban convicted terrorists, ban journalists, ban competitors, play footsie with white supremacists, and sell the office espresso machine at auction before apologizing to their kids.

One of the ickiest things fascists do—and have probably done since humanity developed the ability to speak—is the "ha, I can't believe you reacted to that!" bit.

Because, if you don't react when they're doing fascism, they end up in power. If you do react: "Ha! Gotcha!" They would like you to believe that they are only serious when you ignore them until they have obtained control, and, whenever you pay attention to them, they were just being silly to prove that you're easily baited into responding.

Eerie similarity to pandemics, that.

It’s not coincidental how the people obsessed with “The light of human consciousness” are also the people obsessed with “Humans don’t matter when there’s tech to be built.”

They are simulation theorists whose endgame is to replace biological humanity with humanlike AI. They think AI is more stable and durable than biological life, and more resilient to events that would extinct humans.

They are incorrect, for the same reasons you can still read a 500-year-old book but you don’t own anything that can read a floppy disk.

Honestly, I think we've learned something marginally hopeful about humanity from the M*sk era on Twitter so far: even when the most awful people on Earth have all the resources, they cannot do anything about the power of humor to make them look foolish. This is what comedy is for. It is for taking power away from kings and billionaires.

Plenty of people will follow a tyrant. Far fewer people will follow an object of mockery.

U2 is once again asking for this over-energized child to be removed from his turnout He was just trying to roll, when an AMBUSH

Congratulations to animal rights dumbasses who have never cared for an equine. Thanks to your heroic efforts to save ponies from the world’s easiest job, the ponies are now all homeless in a recession where the cost of hay has doubled. nbclosangeles.com/news/local/his… Prior to the nincompoops who think animals are better off extinct than working getting involved, all the Griffith Park ponies had a guaranteed lifelong retirement, funded by the working ponies. (Social Security for ponies.)

Y'all, Apple is almost certainly threatening to pull Twitter because they've stopped following Apple's objectionable content policy.

(Follow @AuschwitzMuseum which is tracking how suddenly reports of antisemitic content are being found "within policy" at Twitter.) Apple, for liability reasons, takes their content policies pretty seriously.

When I worked for a social media company, our app once got pulled **WITHOUT NOTICE** because Apple reviewers found *two* violating pieces of content on an app with millions of videos.

The mean old lady neighbor heard me telling my handyman her name while she was screaming at him for existing, so in retaliation she has threatened to “tell everyone about your fucking sign.”

So, everyone, I have a “defend Black Lives” sign in my window. My secret is out. The other side says “defund the police,” if you were wondering, and I flip it once in a while. There. Now all my secrets are exposed.

honestly like a thing that is kind of under-covered in writing about and thinking about Melon Tusk is that he's just desperately begging the entire Internet to be like it was when he was young.

everything he's into is 1996-2008 Internet culture. This is a midlife crisis. dude woke up one day and realized there aren't as many early 2000s Chan memes circulating as there used to be and people don't spend all day online talking about Libertarianism and flat taxes anymore

and he decided to turn Twitter into a $44bn mausoleum to his 20s and 30s

Every single company that's done massive layoffs this month has vacancies open for contractors right now.

This isn't "profits are down" (they aren't, except at Twitter because of the new guy) or "costs are up," it's "we no longer want to provide employment." (ok yes technically Meta's profits are down but that's because the CEO abandoned their core business to spend $10 billion a year rebuilding Second Life, meanwhile Linden Lab just did layoffs too)

A story that deserves national coverage, but won’t get it: millennial Pokémon nerd whose campaign put billboards all over LA publicizing how the $3bn LA policing budget defunds schools, parks, and housing appears to be roundly defeating a longtime fixture in city politics.

https://twitter.com/katecagle/status/1590155085677744131

A guy with Koretz’s resume losing in the kind of race most voters barely know exists is HUGE in a city where local politics is so corrupt it generates RICO indictments.

This means Mejia did so much better with voters, the election became unbuyable by the usual dark money players

Felons should be able to vote.

Why? Simple.

The people elected to office decide what the felonies are.

Disenfranchising felons is a powerful incentive for politicians to create new felonies not in the interest of public safety, but in the interest of their own reelection. Democracies that want to remain democracies should not give their politicians levers to pull that can remove people's right to vote.

Ask yourself who the felons would be if the people who call CPS on parents of trans kids were in charge?

Hey! Remember when we helped Afghanistan before by raising over $34,000 for food?

Now Afghanistan has experienced a disastrous earthquake. @ToryKhan25 is on the ground with Aseel documenting and helping - these are his photos.

Can you help them recover? aseelapp.com/en_us/earthqua… Over 1,000 people have already died due to the earthquake, and 1,500 are severely injured. The death toll will only grow in the days to come, as many people are still searching through the rubble looking for missing loved ones.

This young boy's father is injured.

men really think the patriarchy is a productivity hack

https://twitter.com/peaktobi/status/1539234970157432832

being with a dude who pats himself on the back for “balancing work and parenthood” while you’re doing all the parenting sounds so much worse than being a single parent, honestly

At first I thought “how terrible, I hate Elon Musk” and then I realized that having to own Twitter is an entirely appropriate punishment for Elon Musk

https://twitter.com/phil_lewis_/status/1518428486108602368

Can’t wait for the day he has a brief moment of clarity and realizes he could have just been fucking around dropping acid in space and instead he’s spent two years in meetings about issues like “how intelligent does a KGB botnet have to be before free speech applies to it”

Calling on my Jewish community now: with 2 1/2 hours before Shabbat begins, can you contribute $18, $36, or $180 to feed an Afghan baby?

Last night I heard from a father with a sick 4-month-old in Afghanistan. Within hours @ToryKhan25 was in the process of getting food to him.

https://twitter.com/jelenawoehr/status/1506714767435591680

This thing works, y’all. It’s about local knowledge and local leadership.

For @ToryKhan25’s last @ASEELApp campaign, at least 30 recipients had no mobile phones at all and lived in remote areas. This work requires local volunteers who know where to find the neediest people.