I feel this one in my bones

All these Mexicos and he gets pissy about no one wanting to call it the “gulf of 'murica” 🙄

Hahaha guy used to tip with concert tickets! They were such a hot commodity

I was born on Long Island in the '70s and have a congenital predisposition to fucking LOVE Billy Joel. Also, it’s illegal to be from Long Island and not like Billy Joel. I love Billy Joel.

Turns out, I also love memes calling him out for how much harmonica there is in fucking Piano Man

I don’t have a handle on the specifics (I’m an ignorant ass American), but generally speaking, life is hard and getting much harder under a heavy-handed and authoritarian religious/fundamentalist government. There was a fundamentalist revolution in 1979, and that’s allegedly what the people are protesting. (At least that’s what the Washington Post says.) artiman, the mod here, lives in Iran and has been sharing what they see through a wide variety of news sources. Scrolling through the posts of this community can give you an idea of what’s happening on the daily and what some of the protesting is about: repeated school closures due to air pollution, insufficient power leading to daily blackouts, insufficient water and poor management of water resources leading to farms turning to dust, protestors–even children–being killed, skyrocketing inflation, a Nobel Peace Prize winner’s arrest being so violent that she was brought to the emergency room two different times for it. Yes, it’s only coming from one person, but these aren’t little one-off instances or outliers.

There are morality police who beat a woman to death for wearing her hijab in a way that was not up to code (Mahsa Amini in 2022).

Police were attacking protestors before; now that there’s been a call for regime change, they’re killing them.

The regime is under heavy sanctions from the West, and it’s never, ever the people at the top who go without.

People in an affordability crisis were striking because they felt they had no other choices to make their needs clearly known.

The government shut off access to the Internet on Thursday, 8 January.

Here are a couple of news pieces that may shed a little light on the underlying conditions leading to the protests and crackdown:

Hundreds of Iranian protesters feared killed; U.S. considers military strikes: https://wapo.st/4sB8Sxo

Most of Iran Shuts Down as Government Grapples With Protests and Economy: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/world/middleeast/iran-shutdown-protests.html

Have you SEEN how much stuff he’s taken from other people trying to appease him so he doesn’t come after them next? He doesn’t care if they’re pissed as long as they keep handing over their lunch money

intergalactic disciplinary disciplinary intergalactic

another dimension another dimension another dimension another dimension

I don’t have any suggestions, I’m sorry. It’s something you hear about from other people who have lived here longer and just kind of observe happening to you and around you through daily life, the news, and Wikipedia rabbit holes. My favorite depiction of the Machine is in the show South Side. I have no idea how true to life it is, but they capture the spirit of Chicago politics really well.

Lol back in 2019-2020, I volunteered with Marie Newman’s campaign. She was a progressive Democrat running for the House of Representatives, Illinois District 3, as a challenger to the incumbent Dan Lipinski (also a Democrat, but a socially conservative blue dog Dem, so he voted against things like abortion and health care). Here’s the thing about Dan Lipinski: he basically inherited the position from his father and kept it for seven terms. How does that work? Rep. Bill Lipinski ran for re-election in the Dem primary, won it, and then retired. He talked the IL Democratic Party into replacing him with his son on the election ballot. Here in northern Illinois (I don’t know how far the political machine reaches out from Chicago), the dem races are the only races because nobody up here votes republican. (Sidenote: Chuy Garcia, a progressive Representative from IL-4, got reprimanded last month for doing something similar: on the day of the deadline to register for the ballot, he waited until there were only a few hours left and announced his retirement. His chief of staff stepped forward as the only Dem eligible to register because she had already collected all the signatures she needed.)

With that background in mind, let’s get back to my anecdote! I was volunteering for this upstart campaign and I come into the office to all this chatter one day. It was a week or so until the primary, and even busier than expected, so I asked another volunteer what was up. They were trying to catch up on stuff they’d had planned for the previous day, when they’d been unable to work because someone from Lipinski’s campaign physically cut power to the office. If I remember correctly, the power cut was only to the section of the building where Newman’s campaign office and a couple others were, the kind of disruption that took some research to pull off. A breaker getting flipped could’ve been fixed in minutes, maybe an hour if it took that long for someone to go and check it. The power line was cut and getting a line worker to do the repair took them the whole day. Despite the Democratic machine’s best efforts, Newman won the seat. She held it right up until 2023, when they gerrymandered it out from under her.

You do not defy the Machine.

It’s Illinois, so there are a lot of politics in play that aren’t usually an issue in most of the US. If someone in charge of my post office snubbed the wrong person at a work event, it wouldn’t be surprising if the snub-ee did things like moving money around to stop an order of new mail trucks from being deployed to our routes. (That’s not a democrat or republican thing, it’s an Illinois political machine thing.)

However, bigger political issues come into play, too. When DeJoy first took over, people in parts of my House district weren’t getting mail at all. He was removing mail sorting machines from post offices, for cryin’ out loud. Apartment buildings had package dumps that the residents had to comb through to hopefully find their stuff, if it hadn’t been stolen. Letters and packages were getting delayed or lost and being reported as delivered. (I’ve had at least one package get reported as delivered that showed up in my mailbox a week later, but a two-day delay between report and delivery is much more common.) People getting government checks and medication in the mail were left waiting for things that might or might not show up, no indicators of where they were, and nobody to ask for a status update. Just “item delivered at mailbox/front door” and nothing.

Ten years ago, it was $0.49 to mail a first class letter that would be delivered, pretty reliably, in about three days. Now that services have been “brought more into line with existing services” like FedEx and UPS, it’s $0.78 and shows up whenever.

Right now, first class mail to homes in the Chicago area is taking two WEEKS to arrive due to holiday increases. I don’t think it’d be this bad at tax or voting deadlines, but it’s good to know what kind of variability you can expect, especially with all of the changes made to the US postal service since 2017.

Fashionable tan egg rounds out the best advent calendar this year very nicely!

Egg is perfect

Not off the shelf smartwatches; wrist-worn tracking devices issued by ICE.

“The device was not an ordinary smart watch made by Apple or Samsung, but a special type that US Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) had mandated the woman wear at all times, allowing the agency to track her. The device was beeping when she entered the hospital, indicating she needed to charge it, and she worried that if the battery died, ICE agents would think she was trying to disappear, the hospital workers recalled. She told them that, just days earlier, she had been put on a deportation flight to Mexico, but the pilot refused to let her fly because she was so close to giving birth.”

What a fucking dystopia. The only thing that gives me hope for America’s future is knowing that this is part of our established pattern: we’ll never do a right thing without trying all the wrong things first, and we’ll only get there kicking and screaming the whole way. This is part of that wrong-things-first approach, and we’ve got a good deal of kicking and screaming already… I really hope we get to the right-things-last part soon.

Best hold onto your lunch money, EU. That’s how he announces he’s eyeballing you next on the playground. -_-

Not speaking for OP, but aside from catching up with the world in terms of news and culture, social support is a big deal. Being kicked loose means needing a ride to get to … somewhere to go. Hopefully that’s lined up already. Adjusting to non-institutionlized living takes time and practice. Suddenly not being forced onto someone else’s schedule is a big change and can easily lead someone down into a state of depression. It also means having the opportunity to process the time they spent living in prison. It might not be an easy thing to talk about, and there’s always the risk of well-intentioned (or just uncomfortable and not doing a great job of handling it) friends or family being like, “But you’re out now! Why do you still want to talk about it? It’s over, and you need to move on!” but someone just getting out has just spent however long constantly on guard for any little sign of trouble. That’s pretty rough on a person.

There are probably a million other things I’m missing from here, but leaving is a massive transition that can be hard to make for a lot of people for a lot of good reasons. Check out the work of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition in California! Unsupported re-entry is something they’ve been addressing for more than a decade.

And I bet that feels bad.

I am never gonna finish the seating chart for this fucking banquet

Life is better with more hobbies…they open up whole new avenues for things to play with 😆

Thank you! I got into clear stamps and die cutting 😅 I bought a set of llama stamps and matching dies, stamped the stamps, colored them in with colored pencils, and put the whole sheet on a sheet of sticker adhesive. Then I put the dies over the stamped llamas and ran the whole thing through a manual die cutter. (I can’t do normal sticker cuts where you can peel the sticker off the backing sheet because cutting dies work like cookie cutters and they go right through both layers.)

Materials and Equipment

• Manual die cutter (I use a Sizzix Big Kick)

• Clear stamp block or stamp platform

• Paper trimmer

• Mama Elephant Little Llama Agenda stamp set and matching die set

• Colored pencils or alcohol markers

• Black ink stamp pad

• White cardstock

• Sticker paper

The packaging was made with washi tape, a label maker, fancy corner punch, and the plastic sleeve from the stamp set 😅

I’m super into this idea. It’s got stuff! It’s got sharing! It’s got socializing! Seriously, what a rad idea