Aidan

Avoid the marmot

Aidan boosted:
jwzjwz
2025-06-15

@jef @docpop Soooo.... I've spent a good portion of my life looking at a room and estimating attendance. I'm pretty good at it. (My staff and I always use Price Is Right rules, closest without going over.)

Granted, these crowds are 2 orders of magnitude larger than I usually deal with but...

I think there were 30k people *just in Civic Center* as blocks and blocks worth of people were still pouring in and fading out.

My gut tells me 150k, but Price Is Right rules tell me to bid 129,998.

Aidan boosted:
Doctor M. Populardocpop
2025-06-15

Photos from protest in SF today. Local news estimates 50,000 attendees.

A large crowd of folks at the No Kings protest in San Francisco. Protestors are waving American flags and protest signs. One sign says “Trump has small dictator energy” another has a painting of Harvey Milk and a rainbow background. Another photo of the large crowd this one is taken from on top of a hill on Market St, so you can see thousands of attendees going for blocks and blocks. A sign in the foreground says “Immigrants are essential”. Another photo from the protest with several large American flags and protest signs.
Aidan boosted:
Raj Patel :flag_tino:irix@cloudisland.nz
2025-06-15

Classic.

Paragraph from the book ‘One day everyone will have always been against this’- Language is never sufficient. There is not enough of it to take a true mirror of living. In this way, the soothing or afflictive effect of the stories we tell is not in whether we select the right words but in our proximity to what the right words might be. This is not some abstraction, but a very real expression of power-the privilege of describing a thing vaguely, incompletely, dishonestly, is inseparable from the privilege of looking away. Years ago, when I wrote a novel called American War, I found that one of the most popular uses of that phrase was as a Vietnamese moniker for what in the United States is called the Vietnam War. And what in the United States is now called the Civil War once had dozens and dozens of euphemistic names (of which one of the more memorable is the Late Unpleasantness).

@irix will have to look it up. Sounds discomforting, which is the point I guess.

Aidan boosted:
Raj Patel :flag_tino:irix@cloudisland.nz
2025-06-15

It’s sad to think that if this was a horror film people would flock to it. But few want to face it when it’s real. The duality of man.

A paragraph on a page from ‘One day everyone will have always been against this’ - A woman's leg amputated, without anesthesia, the surgery conducted on a kitchen table. A boy holding his father's shoe, screaming. A girl whose jaw has been torn off. A child, still in diapers, pulled out of the tents after the firebombing, his head severed from his body.
Is there distance great enough, to be free of this? To be mad clean?

@irix floofy sun sausage

@irix hairy sun sausage

Aidan boosted:
Raj Patel :flag_tino:irix@cloudisland.nz
2025-06-14

Funk from the Cameroon garage scene... this is a great comp...

Johnny Black et Les Jokers - Mayi Bo Ya?

youtu.be/M0bA06ZHFEE?si=i2UOkm

#FunkyMusic
#JukeboxFridayNight

Aidan boosted:
Raj Patel :flag_tino:irix@cloudisland.nz
2025-06-14

Nigerian funk... another great compilation...

OSAYOMORE JOSEPH AND THE ULELE POWER SOUND - Who Know Man

youtu.be/nshtIDzsNks?si=x-CuK4

#FunkyMusic
#JukeboxFridayNight

Aidan boosted:
Raj Patel :flag_tino:irix@cloudisland.nz
2025-06-14

Kingston funky... its right there in the name...

Toots & the Maytals - Funky Kingston

youtube.com/watch?v=Or2_x8hsGT

#FunkyMusic
#JukeboxFridayNight

Aidan boosted:
Raj Patel :flag_tino:irix@cloudisland.nz
2025-06-14

Gonna take you higher...

Stevie Wonder - Master Blaster

youtube.com/watch?v=rJtxiE5pbR

#FunkyMusic
#JukeboxFridayNight

Aidan boosted:
Raj Patel :flag_tino:irix@cloudisland.nz
2025-06-14

Give it up for Clyde Stubblefield...

James Brown - Funky Drummer

youtube.com/watch?v=QXw6YZltKJ

#FunkyMusic
#JukeboxFridayNight

Aidan boosted:
Raj Patel :flag_tino:irix@cloudisland.nz
2025-06-14

Last one from me... some mellow Sudanese funk...

Sharhabil Ahmed - Ya Shagini

youtube.com/watch?v=fHoKxlVTG3

#FunkyMusic
#JukeboxFridayNight

Aidan boosted:
Bilal Barakat 🍉bifouba@kolektiva.social
2025-06-13

A timely reminder that it is historically undisputed as a matter of fact that Israel •started• the 1967 war.

Even its apologists only claim that it was a "pre-emptive" attack, not that it was anything other than a first strike. Note that "surprise attack" •by definition• means that tensions were not so high yet that all diplomatic options had been exhausted.

There's a time and space symmetry here: only Israel is afforded the privilege of "defending" itself by attacking its neighbours first, and Israel somehow always manages to fight its "defensive" wars on its opponents' territory beyond its own borders... 🤔

Aidan boosted:
WraitheWraithe
2025-06-13
Top picture in the left corner is a giant stack of eggs in cardboard cartons
Picture in lower Wright shows a kitchen setting with eggs being put into cartons

The Antarctic treaty prevents us from keeping any sort of livestock, and we're completely cut off (physically) from the outside world through the winter. Eggs - important not only for breakfast, but also for most of
the baking done here - will ordinarily only last a couple of months, but if you keep them well oiled, the oil will seal the shells and keep them from going off until fresh supplies come in November.
They were all oiled at the start of the season, and last night it was time to freshen up their coatings.
About half the station crowded into the kitchen, poured themselves bowl after bowl of canola oil, and started dipping, rolling, and massaging eggs.
There were the predictable casualties (beer, very oily hands, and thousands of eggs were never meant to go together), but within an hour we'd unpacked, oiled, and repacked more eggs than most people see in a lifetime.
Aidan boosted:
lucie digitálníluciedigitalni@aus.social
2025-06-13

"Through all this, Defence Minister Richard "Tickety-Boo" Marles maintains the relentless optimism of a character in a horror story who insists there's nothing to worry about as the walls start bleeding and the floorboards whisper your name. He assured us this week that there's "no need for a Plan B," which should really have been followed by a comically large tentacle exploding out of his mouth."

#AusPol #AUKUS
aliensideboob.substack.com/p/a

Aidan boosted:
2025-06-13

Farewell Aunty Jack.

Canberra day festival. 16th March 1974.

Aunty Jack was an Australian cult comedy show that ran during 1972 and 1973.

Aunty Jack was a unique comic creation – obese, moustachioed and gravel-voiced, part trucker and part pantomime dame – who habitually solved any problem by knocking people unconscious or threatening to “rip yer bloody arms off”. Visually, she was unmistakable, dressed in a huge, tent-like blue velvet dress, football socks, workboots, and a golden boxing glove on her right hand. She rode a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and referred to everyone as “me little lovelies” – when she was not uttering her familiar threat: “I’ll rip yer bloody arms off!”, a phrase which immediately passed into the vernacular.

— Wikipedia.

Here she can be seen atop an army flat bed truck during the Canberra Day festival with her TV sidekicks Thin Arthur and Kid Eager.

I remember that dad was pretty chuffed that Aunty looked directly at the camera when he took this shot.

Project Re-Xpose.
I’m re-scanning my dad’s old 35mm slides. Many have not seen light for over 30 years.

#Australia #Canberra #Comedy #photography #Television

Aidan boosted:
Ben Brockertwikkit
2025-06-13

This is the 100 year anniversary of humans having an idea of what the heck the sun and all the stars actually are. If you had asked a leading astronomer in 1925 what the sun was, they would say that it's basically the same as Earth, but very hot.

In Cecilia Payne's doctoral thesis she was the first to say, from spectral data, that the sun was overwhelmingly made of hydrogen and helium.

It was later described as "the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy".

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_

Aidan boosted:
2025-06-12

The build estimate was $7m, ended up costing $102m, but turns out the House is invaluable.
And in a very Australian way of doing things, it was mostly paid for by a state lottery.
You don’t always get the perfect shot, but sometimes you do.
Sydney on a winter’s dawn.

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