This entire thread has made my day. I applaud your work here!

What you need on a warship is definitely respiratory illness spreading like wildfire through close quarters! It makes everyone manlier. Or something.

I'm so sorry. Sending warm thoughts to you and yours.

We have a kid at Hampshire. The board mishandled this so badly that nearly all staff and faculty are being booted with minimal notice and zero severance: www.amherstindy.org/2026/04/20/e...

Collected nominating signatures for @edmarkey.bsky.social today, after giving my neighborhood a heads-up that Markey supports my trans kids and his primary opponent (Seth effin' Moulton) does not.

I got 60 more signatures in 90 minutes. My neighbors are not on board with bigots. 🏳️‍⚧️🫶

@alt-text.bsky.social

Seconding this. I had an ankle replacement, not knee surgery, but I had no idea until afterward that my only options for a while would be harem pants and skirts.

Have you used them recently? I used to swear by Chattanooga ice wraps, but the last three I ordered in 2021 all leaked and had to be thrown away :(

I don't subscribe to Substack blogs either, for ethical reasons. But I do pay for newspaper and magazine subscriptions, and a few indie journalists with reasonable subscription tiers. If they can't eat and put a roof over their heads, the world is a poorer place.

And that attitude right there is why journalism is collapsing :(

There are accelerated completion and transfer paths in place. We're very worried for our Hampshire kid, who had two more semesters to go after the closing date.

They were planning for three more semesters after the current one. But yes.

Fuck all the way off.

Thanks! They do ship to the U.S. but I can't find any in their site. Still, I'll write and ask -- those are beautiful.

Wow! Where’d you get the mask?

I've been sobbing for the last several minutes. I hoped for but didn't expect a safe return.

Early Eighties for me, and I seriously considered three colleges, two of which I'd never seen; I made my list based on the reams of brochures I got in the mail after the PSAT. I'd never been anywhere near Chicago until the day I arrived at the U of C campus.

I suspect that the difference is class; your parents had the means to tour all those schools. I went to a high school where almost anyone who did go to college went to the local state-school branch, and most of the rest applied to better colleges sight unseen. My paper route didn't cover travel.

I actually didn't post that as a reminder -- the text was so tiny I couldn't read it (and it's a shame the alt-text bot is so erratic!).

But thanks for considering it. You may want to have your settings "require alt text"; even if you did before, Bluesky sometimes switches it off.

@alt-text.bsky.social

I had a cat who went mad for lemon poppyseed muffins. He cared not a whit for any other starch, but if I was holding a lemon poppyseed muffin he'd climb me and maneuver down my arm like a trapeze artist to get to it. (This was particularly astounding because he also regularly fell off windowsills.)

A screenshot of the part of the accessibility settings with the option of “Require alt text before posting” selected

Reminder: including alt-text on your images is helpful in many ways! It increases accessibility, can add context/detail, makes search more effective, & can improve your reach (a lot of us won’t re-share images without alt-text). If you set it as required in accessibility settings, you can’t forget!

What Is Alt Text? Why You Should Use It, and How to Write It An article about the descriptive text in web content.

www.howtogeek.com/821673/what-...

🤨

They let most of them go. I work with a former NYT copyed who was snapped up by another organization after being laid off.

Bite me, darling.

[side-eyes you, having watched the first landing on TV]

She's our state senator too! We like her -- she shows up.

THANK YOU.

I screwed up my credit for *years* in my 20s because my university kept sending me to conferences using an Amex they swore they’d reimburse promptly. Nope. And they weren’t paying me enough to cover it out of my own pocket :(

The founder said that Gilead Sciences was named for the 1965 play "Balm in Gilead," which was in turn a reference to a healing herb in the Bible. It's not about Atwood.

But yes, this behavior is vile enough that the double-take is warranted.