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vickevlar.bsky.social
bethswald
@vickevlar.bsky.social
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vickevlar.bsky.social
tryin to feel some empowerment and unity amidst the depression in da burgh
Urban protest crowd with a sea of signs and flags. The photo is focused on a large cardboard sign that states "Oligargle my hair balls" Urban protest crowd scene, with the blue sky reflecting off a large building's windows and yellowing call leaves in the background. The photo is focused on American flags and a trans pride flag fluttering in the breeze
October 18, 2025 at 11:35 PM
vickevlar.bsky.social
Have I missed anything
Photogtaph of a bald eagle's head jutting out from behind a tree branch. It's sticking its tongue out, making it appear a bit bewildered and silly
July 14, 2025 at 2:32 AM
vickevlar.bsky.social
Is it that predictable lol
Chat exchange: "I have Fucked Up on bsky" "cuz of the contra thing" "Haha yeah" "you getting pig balls sent to you or somethin"
July 11, 2025 at 8:42 PM
vickevlar.bsky.social
This was my ballot, which I tried to include different genres (plus a personal fave just for me lol,) but it did feel weird leaving off Michael Clayton & Parasite and decided to just do a single Coen brothers which all feel stronger than some of my votes...
My ballot was Lord of the Rings Fellowship of the Ring, No Country for Old Men, Monsters Inc, Spirited Away, Napoleon Dynamite, REC, Children of Men, OJ Made in America, Interstellar, and The Station Agent
June 27, 2025 at 6:26 PM
vickevlar.bsky.social
I sometimes get an urge to retake this quiz until I get every county I *should* know, though it's mostly every county I try to be clever enough to guess
Online quiz of every county in the United States, color coded green and red for what I was able to name. I named 1148 (37%) and I'm annoyed at glaring red spots of counties I should know but just can't recall on demand
June 23, 2025 at 5:03 PM
vickevlar.bsky.social
Da burgh #nokings
Scene from a protest. The image is focused on a black and gold sign that says No Nazis in Pgh A protest scene with tall buildings flanking a blue sky above and a sea of signs below. The US Steel building on the right, and a historic Lutheran church on the left. A pride flag stands out from the sidewalk trees and in the distance an American flag waves in the wind.
June 14, 2025 at 7:56 PM
vickevlar.bsky.social
For mother's day, it's my dad's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother and my mother's mother's mother's mother.
Grid showing a succession of black and white portraits of women. The top starts with a woman wearing dress from circa 1865 down to the 1880s, early 1900s, 1920s, and 1940s.
May 11, 2025 at 9:10 PM
vickevlar.bsky.social
Inject it into my veins
Screenshot of a portion of the agency reduction in force temporary restraining order that states: "DOGE: As plaintiffs rightly note, DOGE 'has no statutory authority at all.'"
May 11, 2025 at 1:00 AM
vickevlar.bsky.social
@jpstormcrow.bsky.social sometimes "last game played" is less instructive than "most game played"
cover art for Age of Empires, the Rise of Rome showing the coliseum burning and clashing armies riding horses and elephants screenshot showing 11,823 hours played on Steam
April 26, 2025 at 7:26 PM
vickevlar.bsky.social
share your last 4 played games to expose your gaming habits and possibly the secret to your soul
Cover art for Dawn of Man with silhouette of a mammoth and 4 people against a setting sun. it's not even a good game! I have so many better city management games! It was just novel and I am depressed! Cover art for Blue Prince, showing a cascade of open doorways with a boy opening the door to the last one. this is one of the most me games ever made Cover art for Faceminer, showing a retro computer covered with post-it notes with square over a shadowed and somewhat obscured human face. one of those little games with a strong point of view/message that is worth experiencing but has zero replay value Cover art for The Almost Gone, showing a house in a dead tree amongst a lot of negative space. Another little game with a strong story/message with very little replay value
April 26, 2025 at 7:19 PM
vickevlar.bsky.social
Repost with the first album you bought with your own money.
Album art for R.E.M.'s Lifes Rich Pageant. Depicts a high contrast/deeply shadowed photo of a man over a pale photo of American bison
April 22, 2025 at 11:26 PM
vickevlar.bsky.social
Meanwhile I simply hope to retvrn
Lion-man, a paleolithic mammoth tusk carving of a half human, half feline figure. He has a leopard for a face
April 9, 2025 at 4:24 AM
vickevlar.bsky.social
It's good to see like-minded people
A rain-speckled cardboard sign that says "Fascism bad"
April 5, 2025 at 10:30 PM
vickevlar.bsky.social
Headshot of Tor Johnson from Plan 9 From Outer Space. He plays a sort of zombie reanimated by aliens, his face is vacant, angry and monstrous and he looks just like RFK Jr and has about an equally functioning brain.
April 5, 2025 at 2:52 AM
vickevlar.bsky.social
Quote from The Little Prince: This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week, and you would feel no need for anything to drink. Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince. Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said the merchant. "Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week." And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?" Anything you like..." As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.
March 29, 2025 at 7:49 PM
vickevlar.bsky.social
Losing the largest employer in a state would be a huge impact, so here are some maps compared to that. First, using that median as the maximum color value, and then comparing each state's largest employer to the federal government to take into account their specific situations:
An alternative choropleth to USAToday's map that uses 16,150 as the maximum value to display the darkest tones as the same, selected because it is the median number of employees for the largest single private source across the US. Almost the entire map is dark blue, except for the northern west/midwest states. This is not a good or fair map in my opinion, but I created it to highlight that these data visualizations are just tools to tell different stories. In this case, the story is extremely different compared to the first map's. An alternative choropleth to USAToday's map that uses a 3-tone color scheme to display the difference between the number of employees employed by the largest single private sector source and the federal government in different states, with dark blue indicating more government, white indicating equal numbers, and dark orange indicating more private secetor. Most of the map is blue. This is not a good or fair map in my opinion, but I created it to highlight that these data visualizations are just tools to tell different stories. In this case, the story is extremely different compared to the first map's.
March 2, 2025 at 7:17 PM
vickevlar.bsky.social
However, an even more meaningful map would take into account the state's population, as they'll be relatively impacted more by smaller raw numbers. Otherwise, wow a map about a number of people that really highlights CA and TX? You don't say. Now we have a *completely* different story:
An alternative choropleth to USAToday's map, using the number of employees normalized by the state's population. Instead of highlighting just CA, TX, and states surrounding DC, now we see that rural, low population states also have disproportionate number of federal employees. The color ramp here also does not extend to the entire maximum of the dataset, as it is skewed by DC's unbelievable 23% employment by the federal government. I chose 1% of the state's population as the maximum for reasons explained in the next image. A graph that shows the number of federal employees as a proportion of their state's population. The Y axis is clipped, due to DC's extremely outlying rate. AK, HI, MD, and VA are also very high but not even close to DC. 85% of states have a federal employee-to-population rate of 0.01 (1% of the state's population), so I chose this the ceiling for which all colors in the map will be the same darkest tone. Again, this is just from eyeballing the data, a more robust statistical approach is always better, but also 1% is a nice round number as a happy accident.
March 2, 2025 at 7:09 PM
vickevlar.bsky.social
I don't like their map, so some alternatives. First, USAToday's map has a linear color ramp between the min & max. This is misleading because it is skewed by a few high-population outliers. More info in the alt text, but just eyeballing the max value containing most of the dataset:
A graph of the raw number of full time federal employees by state. The graph shows that 5 states have far higher numbers than others (CA, DC, MD, TX, VA.) 85% of the states have fewer than 60,000 federal employees, so I used this as the ceiling for the maximum color in the map. Anything above 60,000 will display the same color, despite the huge difference between the literal maximum value in the dataset and this depicted maximum. A more robust statistical approach is better but due to laziness I'm just eyeballing it. This approach has a bias, too, that downplays the impacts on these particular states. However, using the literal maximum is in my opinion a worse bias, as it collapses the distinctions between most states into a single "about the same when compared to the most extreme" bucket. If I weren't being lazy by just using Excel, I would mitigate this problem by not using a linear display and would bin the data so that the more extreme states could be captured with an additional color that expresses their intensity. There is NO single perfect way to display data, both maps together is probably best. An alternative choropleth to USAToday's map, using 60,000+ as the ceiling to display, for reasons explained in the previous picture. The map appears very similar to USAToday's, but makes it clearer that many states have a large number of federal employees, without being compressed by the extreme number of employees in a small number of states. Again, I would normally mitigate this by binning the data in a non-linear way.
March 2, 2025 at 7:03 PM
vickevlar.bsky.social
My ggreat grandfather was from Rivne as well. This is where my maternal ancestors were born, compare the Mighty Ukraine (and Ukraine-bordered) presence to weak US showing
Map of Ukraine and surrounding countries with highlighted oblasts and Polish voivodeships denoting the number of people born there. Dniepropetrovsk, Rivne, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Lviv are highlighted in Ukraine as well as Lublin and Podkarpackie in Poland. Map of the United States with New York and New Jersey highlighted
March 1, 2025 at 2:51 AM
vickevlar.bsky.social
White
Headshot portrait from the article's slideshow of people involved. It's a smiling white male uniformed police officer with a buzz cut squinting very hard. His ears are also kinda big. The caption simply reads, "White." It's his name, but it's funny
February 25, 2025 at 5:54 AM
vickevlar.bsky.social
I made a very small and pointless (and probably ultimately self-defeating) action on principle at work today, and I think maybe this is the closest I can think of for articulating why it bothered me so much?
Photo of a passage from Catch-22: Yossarian rejected the advice with a skeptical shake of his head. "When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent human impulse and every human tragedy." "But you must try not to think of that," Major Danby insisted. "And you must try not to let it upset you." "Oh, it doesn't really upset me. What does upset me, though, is that they think I'm a sucker. They think that they're smart, and that the rest of us are dumb. And you know, Danby, the thought occurs to me right now, for the first time, that maybe they're right."
February 22, 2025 at 3:52 AM
vickevlar.bsky.social
Lil bit of exercising (my rights)
Photograph of a person on the street in coat and gloves holding a sign that says "SUPPORT FEDERAL WORKERS, IMPEACH LAWLESS AUTOCRATS"
February 17, 2025 at 7:42 PM
vickevlar.bsky.social
Thanks for clarifying
Screenshot of an email from John Fetterman with the subject line: "I'm a Democrat, Beth."
February 15, 2025 at 7:18 PM
vickevlar.bsky.social
John Fetterman, I hate your fucking guts, man. Why don't you respond to one of my emails about the constitutional crisis you claim we aren't experiencing instead? He's achieved something TRULY incredible with this
Horribly cloying I can haz cheezburger fundraising email screenshot from John fetterman with two dogs in a valentine, saying: "hiiiii Beth, hiiii! It's Levi + artie fetterman (dog emoji) and we're here to make this valentine's day the best EVER for our 2nd* favorite hooman HAWN (*Gisele #1 always (heart emoji)) Screenshot continued saying, "we've been working extra hard to give JAWN all the luv a hooman coal need while he fights for yinz in the senate. But there's something else he needs too: MONEYZ for the campaign! So we need ur help 2 surprise JAWN with the best valentine's day EVER. can u plz throw JAWN'S campaign a couple bones or $5 if u can today? Thank you + happy valentine's day!! (Star emoji). Tysm bestie!!!" GIANT DONATE BUTTON
February 15, 2025 at 12:09 AM
vickevlar.bsky.social
I have a coworker who is retiring at the end of the year and he started working in government two years before I was even born. These people have massively invaluable institutional knowledge, the problem isn't their presence, it's that the bureaucracy hasn't been able to grow with enough new blood.
Graph from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that the federal workforce size has stayed about the same for decades, despite the American population growing and systems in civilization becoming increasingly complex and specialized. https://data.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/CES9091000001;jsessionid=FE056FF523CB23269F3F10698F8202D6
February 9, 2025 at 4:42 AM