A-mess-of-links - Some Useful Links

When I was in ninth grade I wanted to challenge what I saw as a very stupid dress code policy (not being allowed to wear spikes regardless of the size or sharpness of the spikes). My dad said to me, “What is your objective?”

He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)

I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.

What is your objective?

Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.

I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.

I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.

Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.

Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.

How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?

Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.

Don’t be a dickhead. Be smarter than I was at 14. Ask yourself: what is your objective?

ok i made this post before but i deleted it because it turned out to not be true, but NOW it is. tumblr has officially forced its shitty shitty dogshit new dashboard onto me. but i already had the dashboard unfucker installed for a different account so it's cool. mostly. anyways if you wanna remove the nasty dashboard you should first install (and enable) the tampermonkey addon which i'm pretty sure is available on most browsers, and then go to the dashboard unfucker github page, scroll down and click on "unfucker.user.js" and then click the "raw" button and it should install the script for you, and then you just gotta refresh any tumblr tabs you have open (may take a bit to load the changes!) <3 bye bye twitter-like dashboard!!! no one liked you anyway

We need to have a nomination for “Stupidest thing Tumblr.com has ever believed” and just move into an official Top 10 List.

For my nominations, I’m putting up:

If you eat a chocolate bar a very specific way, you will break physics and get infinite chocolate.

or

It is impossible that you spelled “Berenstain Bears” wrong and is, instead, more likely that the universe fractured into separate, overlapping realities in the last 20 years.

I can’t decide which is more beautiful. It’s why we need a vote.

Hannibal: Season 3B

3x08 - The Great Red Dragon - Commentary with creator Bryan Fuller and actor Richard Armitage

3x09 - And the Woman Clothed With the Sun … - Commentary with creator Bryan Fuller and actor Rutina Wesely

3x10 - And the Woman Clothed in Sun - Commentary with creator Bryan Fuller and actor Richard Armitage

3x12 - The Number Of The Beast Is 666 - Commentary with executive producer Steve Lightfoot and actor Lara Jean Chorostecki

3x13 - The Wrath Of The Lamb - Commentary with creator Bryan Fuller and actor Hugh Dancy

https://mega.nz/#F!GcsnVKhB!tKxkvd34xvLHhNUikFmTIw

I think the hot new trends for this summer should be reading comprehension and critical thinking skills

Red Trees is a very sweet horror story where you search for a monster that’s terrifying a little town.

Read More & Play The Full Game, Free (Windows)

Nip For Speed is an absurd little adventure where a crazed cat takes you for a spin along a highway!

Read More & Play The Full Game, Free (Browser)

Full Gameplay Video: