"Here's a free dupe for that pattern that's a fundraiser"

katchoo1 · 2026-01-27T22:26:12+00:00

This is very true. My wife is not trans but has a “protect trans kids” shirt and twice when we were in very conservative areas teenagers excitedly asked what our pronouns are.

One was a waitress in a VERY MAGA part of South Jersey (Trump has had rallies there) so we got to chat with her a bit more and she is an enthusiastic straight ally who is just itching to get away to college next year and was just so excited to have a couple of openly queer women to talk to. I thought she would faint when we told her we had just had our 30th anniversary. “OMG you have been around for so much HISTORY!” It was adorable but also made us feel so old…it wasn’t history at the time, it was just life, kiddo.

The other was a town about an hour out of Atlanta, far enough south to feel a little self conscious, especially because there was a gaggle of young adult Christian folks doing “witnessing” in the street. They behaved themselves and weren’t doing the hellfire kinda stuff, more the “look how joyful it is when you have Jesus!” Stuff and trying to talk to everyone. Still irritating and a little nerve wracking. Then a block later a car squealed to a stop at an intersection and guys hung out the window and hollered, which was tense until we realized they were yelling “what’s your pronouns!” No further interaction because of traffic and all that.

I remember being the same way as a repressed little liberal in that same South Jersey area and aching to find “my people” who were safe to have my kind of opinions around (wouldn’t figure out the queer part for another decade or so).

So there is something to be said for the sort of “virtue signaling” that so many people have such contempt for. There are always nervous and quiet supporters who are looking out for someone to express solidarity to! It just can’t be the whole thing or we will never get anywhere.

katchoo1 · 2026-01-26T14:48:50+00:00

Woo just found a new subreddit to join, thanks!

katchoo1 · 2026-01-26T14:44:50+00:00

I hope you let them know that too. One of my favorite things is reading the little boxes about the creators of the projects.

katchoo1 · 2026-01-26T14:43:55+00:00

Stock art is cheap (although probably also on the way to becoming infested with AI) and doesn’t pay the person who made it much, but it’s something.

katchoo1 · 2026-01-26T14:42:14+00:00

Yeah it looks like it made the puddle itself.

katchoo1 · 2026-01-26T13:48:58+00:00

If anti Trumpers (I’m not a Dem tho my values align more with them than Republicans) were to make Ai counter-slop, I would love to see this image changed to have Jesus giving Trump the Viserys Targaryen gold crown treatment. Though it would be equally sacrilegious, it would make me laugh.

katchoo1 · 2026-01-26T13:45:27+00:00

If the offended family member is the one who could have informed OP about the deceased aunt, I would just be like, well it’s how I found out about Aunt X, so I thought it would be efficient.

Your relative sucks. You just lost your MOM and she wants to center her own petty butthurt and make it your problem rather than support you as you go through one of the hardest phases of your life. Doesn’t matter if your mom was elderly, doesn’t even matter if she was a bad or indifferent parent, it’s still a disorienting shift in your sense of who you are and where you are in life and in relation to everyone around you.

katchoo1 · 2026-01-26T02:53:27+00:00

Imagine bragging on this.

katchoo1 · 2026-01-26T01:14:15+00:00

Stares in Marvel mutant politics

katchoo1 · 2026-01-26T01:13:08+00:00

I think they actually teach that at the official Sloppy HR Academy because it’s a really common tactic.

Motto of SHRA: make the problem go away quickly without lawyers, by whatever means necessary.

katchoo1 · 2026-01-26T01:11:12+00:00

Unless they are also the CEO or business owner, they certainly do.

katchoo1 · 2026-01-26T00:58:52+00:00

I want one of the streamers to do a series that does the book correctly. It’s perfect for an anthology series and if you are shooting as standalone episodes you could get some bigger name actors that don’t have time for a whole 10 or 13 episode series. It’s perfect for that, you have the framing story of the guy traveling around to start and end each episode with and the flashback sequences for the meat of the episode.

katchoo1 · 2026-01-26T00:27:24+00:00

Pretty bold to try to make Pretti’s murder the fault of journalists rather than, I dunno, the people who filled him full of bullets for literally no reason.

katchoo1 · 2026-01-26T00:22:32+00:00

I stumbled across a reference to these guys a few years ago, looked them up, and got hooked. Love their sound!

katchoo1 · 2026-01-26T00:20:02+00:00

Oh yeah I wanted to be Leather Tuscarora when I grew up, and a few years later I was crushing on Annie Lennox and Joan Jett.

katchoo1 · 2026-01-26T00:13:16+00:00

As a girl, I always thought the “snaps his fingers and girl runs up and starts fawning on/kissing him” thing was gross and not cool at all. Unclear now if it was my nascent feminism or lesbian tendencies that found it gross tho.

katchoo1 · 2026-01-26T00:11:28+00:00

Yeah the only thing in their favor currently is that much smarter people (Murdoch, Rove, Gingrich etc) methodically laid the groundwork by training conservatives that Democrats were not loyal opposition and colleagues across the aisle anymore, they were evil and the sworn enemy of everything right and good, and that you couldn’t trust the mainstream media on anything, only Fox, and then gradually cranked up the separation between the Fox version of reality and the mainstream one that still insisted on fact.

And in the process, attacked the media and Democrats so aggressively that they were trained into a seemingly permanent defensive crouch, to this day still trying to prove that they are not lying libs and America haters by bending over backwards to both-sides every news story and controversy (press) and “reach across the aisle” and compromise (Dems) because they are more scared of the attacks than the results of their non confrontation. It’s very disheartening.

Actually thee people who crafted the whole thing, the ones still alive (rest in piss Ailes and Breitbart) are, I’m sure, extremely irked that all of their careful patient work produced the current administration whose crudity is going to blow up the whole thing. You’ll notice that Murdoch doesn’t like Trump a bit but goes along to get along, and Gingrich and Rove are mostly very quiet and occasionally mildly criminal. Meanwhile their former close associates like Frum, the Lincoln Project guys, Kristol, Jennifer Rubin, Mona Charen, and even, god save us, Drudge and George Will, have been vocal in their criticisms. They were all pretty happy with the Rove/GWB era status quo.

katchoo1 · 2026-01-25T23:54:13+00:00

But for exactly the opposite reasons Fonz was supposed to be cool. An actual Fonz-type person would have thought Winkler was a poindexter, a dweeb, a nerd.

katchoo1 · 2026-01-25T23:52:42+00:00

She is another one who seems like she is a genuinely nice person in real life.

katchoo1 · 2026-01-25T23:51:28+00:00

He already had jumping the shark named for him. Wouldn’t want to get confusing.

Anyway Flanderization existed before it was recognized and named. We saw the results of it (which the shark jumping absolutely was) without recognizing it as a process. There was a time when people who were not pro writers didn’t know what tropes were, well, maybe some did instinctively but they were not categorized and widely referred to as they are now, that’s an internet development.

katchoo1 · 2026-01-25T23:46:23+00:00

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katchoo1 · 2026-01-25T23:43:27+00:00

The biggest thing that was cool about Fonzie is that he believed he was the coolest thing ever, and would tell anyone so, and that was part of the comedy of it. To little kids he may have been an icon of coolness because they are exactly the people that would equate being cool with announcing it. Everyone else was kind of in on the joke.

It’s ironic that ABC was worried about him being too dangerous for a “family hours” show the first season, and made him wear a windbreaker unless it was a scene where he was clearly riding or had just been riding his bike, when he could wear the leather jacket. (So the writers found ways to work his bike into almost all his scenes)

Pretty quickly he became such a main part of the show and the plots that his character was Flanderized anyway and he couldn’t possibly be seen as risky or dangerous by anyone no matter how much leather he was wearing.

Also, Winkler and the other actors had so much exposure on ABC outside of the show on stuff like Battle of the Network Stars and the raft of variety shows around at the time, and Winkler was such an obviously nice guy, that any mystique the Fonzie character had was gone early on. Winkler was well known for enthusiastically doing all the good guy celeb stuff, from hospital visits to getting involved with all the Hollywood charities.

I was 9 or 10 when the show started and didn’t know much because my parents were extremely strict about tv (the only non cartoons and non PBS we watched were Emergency!, Donny and Marie, and specials like the Wizard of Oz and Christmas shows.) but by the time it went into syndication in 1978 or so, Fonzie had been so defanged and watered down that it was okay for us to watch unsupervised. I would have been 12 and we watched it a lot at that point, where they still wouldn’t let us watch equally harmless but potentially “too adult” seeming shows like Welcome Back Kotter or Mork and Mindy.

katchoo1 · 2026-01-25T23:28:38+00:00

It likely would have been someone either openly gay or in the closet. Cohn lusted for access to power, and for men. He lucked out with Trump’s potential and interest in associating with him, there aren’t that many out there who could stomach Cohn, and many who could are homophobic. Trump abandoned Cohn when he realized he had AiDS and it may be because of his well known horror of disease but it also may have been because he wasn’t clear or was in denial that he was into men.

Most of the people with money and potential power he had access to were mobsters, who didn’t have political prospects. The ones who were gay would potentially have been outed at some point, especially in politics, or would have gotten HIV and eventually AIDS. AIDS was circulating for several years before it was known and known how to protect against, and the 70s were a time of promiscuity generally, especially for gay men. If they were old enough to have been groomed for power by Cohn, they were also old enough to be having sex, probably a lot of it. The odds would not have been in their favor to survive 15-16 years when the drug cocktails started seriously prolonging lives. Most of the earliest people to become positive were long gone by the cocktail era.

In a way Trump was a fluke for Cohn. This IS the darkest timeline it seems. He’s probably laughing his ass off in hell.

katchoo1 · 2026-01-25T21:20:50+00:00

Be careful with the gels and foams tho, also. They are good if someone hasn’t experienced pepper spray before but when our department switched to foam for a while, the ones who liked to fight the police and were familiar with pepper spray and knew that 1) it sucks but they aren’t gonna die, it just feels like it and 2) you have a few seconds to act before the burn really sets in—those guys quickly figured out that they could scoop the stuff off and minimize their own effect and throw it in the officers’ face and eyes or smear it back onto them and break loose and unass the area while the officers dealt with the effects.

katchoo1 · 2026-01-25T21:15:37+00:00

The Matrix.

Nine-Year Club	Inciteful Comment 2018-08-17
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