Sketchy gestures

I lived and worked in a lighthouse at a previous job.  There was a thick line painted in a circle around the shack where the fog signal was kept.  The line represented how close you could get to the fog signal without experiencing physical harm in the form of eardrums shattering or worse.

Even in the house it was LOUD.  Probably the loudest thing I have ever experienced but at a normal, predictable interval.  You would begin to time your sentences with little pauses with the rest of the lighthouse crew so you would talk like this while making your………..HORN…………. tea and then carry on talking because you knew when it would go off.  It rattled the walls and the dishes in our cabinet.

At least one girl had died there. They kept photos of her everywhere “in honor of her sacrifice” because she had decided to take the winter watch alone and died in a storm where bounders the size of mini vans had been lifted out of the ocean and left scattered across the island, to say nothing of the ice chunks.  People weren’t allowed to be alone on the watch after that.

One day a dead moose washed up on shore and it took my entire crew all day but we managed to rig up a line to hang it up to dry because we thought having a moose skeleton in the house would really spice the living room up a bit.  It did.  Weird shit happens when six of you are left alone, like ALONE ALONE, no cell reception, no wifi, just a radio to contact the real world and not a lot of reason to do that.  People don’t go on lighthouse jobs if they want to stay connected, I’ve found.

That said Id do it all again, I really do treasure those days

Placing these one after another makes it look like he left got a lighthouse job and came back six months later to update the drive through employee

i don’t normally like to add onto posts but i thought this thread was pretty insightful (link)

perhaps also worth noting that there was a folk revival about ten years earlier that paved the way for stuff like Mumford and Sons, with lo-fi musicians such as  Bonnie Prince Billy, Iron and Wine, The Mountain Goats (in the casiotone days), Bill Callahan, Calexico, the Decemberists etc. However this earlier wave was pretty dark music, about all the things that folk music is typically about - murder, death, substance abuse, depression, etc. It gave us “A Crow Looked at Me” and “I See a Darkness” and “No Children” and “Magnolia Electric Co”, iow some of my favorite music of all time.

The Beard Brigade that cropped up later capitalized on the steady audiences that these groups had built but were not nearly so doom-laden (or as talented) and as a result got the heavy radio play that none of the above bands ever received. 

Of course, if you really want to talk poliics and radio airplay you have to go back to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the subseqent rise of Clear Channel, and what happened on the radio immediately after 9/11. 

best moments in gaming journalism

highlights:

i’ve seen these quotes a hundred times but never the full article — 200k notes and i’ve never seen someone mention the guy saying “they should let kiryu smoke meth”

World Heritage Post

alley cat gives unsolicited advice

Giant Sculpture Opens Its Chest To Reveal a Fern-Covered Tunnel People Can Walk Through

drew a scene from my fic hey

good morning

my frogs w burnout series

JANE FONDA in BARBARELLA dir. Roger Vadim

i think anne magills paintings and Edward hoppers are like .. exact opposites. hoppers has the distinct clarity to it, a sharpness in the lines and the angles that contributes to an overwhelming sense of loneliness in almost every one of his paintings. even in his paintings that dont portray isolation there is a feeling of separation

loneliness vs. aloneness

magill, on the other hand, has this haziness to her paintings that emanates a warmth even when the subjects in her paintings are alone.

both paintings feel so comforting, and even in the second one where the girl is alone she is still in the presence of the visceral world around her - there’s a familiarity in magills painting that she captures nicely.

i guess i just think it’s interesting because hopper and magill are two of my favorite artists and they paint similar scenes with very different tones -

I’ve always thought that hoppers paintings are a snapshot of urban loneliness - the distinctness of it, the use of cool colors, the stark contrast between the people and their settings - whereas magills paintings seem almost like memories - their use of haziness and blurriness is exactly how someone wild remember something, indistinct, full of feeling and lacking detail

Modern Spongebob is wild man

what the fuck

oh….oh we getting down like that now.

Welll damnnn

Women fear me, fish want me

Hospitals are struggling for nurses right now because people are leaving the profession entirely or leaving for temporary travel contract positions that pay well. They have been treated poorly, underpaid for the work they do, and inadequately protected this year, and they’re done.

My brother in law said they’re advertising for a position in his normal unit, offering twice his salary. But they won’t offer him extra to stay after risking his life working in the COVID unit for months, so he’s out. It’s absolutely insulting, and so many industries are going to have a major reckoning coming up.

My father retired early because they refused to hire just one person to help with the work load. They had to hire 5 people to replace him.

This is a common occurrence amongst his retired coffee group.

One lady was a head nurse that ran two floor at her hospital. They wanted her to take on more work. She agreed to do so oy if they gave her a small raise and hired an assistant for her. They refused so she retired early. They had to replace her with 20 people.

You are NOT replaceable!!! They tell you this to make you complacent to their exploration of you.

Fun fact! This sort of reckoning happened after the Black Plague, also! I'm no historian, (and history side of tumblr, please come in with the accuracy) but I did look into the history of the Black Plague for writing purposes, and in that case, it was because there were so few people left that peasants started agitating for better treatment and fairer wages, and because there were so few people who could do the work they had been doing that they were able to gain better wages and better hours. Historically, the labour shortage created by pandemics means a heightened bargaining capacity for workers of all sorts - an if there was ever a time to take advantage of knowing history, it's now. Because the thing is, in these "unprecedented times" there are precedents, and the precedent leans toward workers. During the Black Death, villages emptied, fields were left, and people migrated to find work that paid them better and offered a better way of life. Wages for lower-class workers rose drastically. In Oxfordshire; a plowman who had earned two shillings per week before the plague could command 10 shillings per week afterward. Pay rates for artisans increased, too. In Paris, wages for masons quadrupled between 1351 and 1355.

This isn't to say that the elites just let this happen, either. Laws were passed to limit wage increases, and threats were made, but the workers had economic bargaining power on their side. Labour was in such short supply that employers and landlords had to take what they could get. The people held out - and so can (and should!) YOU.

This was the start of peasant revolts, popular rebellions, and - ultimately, more labour protections, political representation for the lower classes, lower taxes, and an end to serfdom. People could afford to own their own land, the feudal system vanished, and eventually, the Renaissance would rise. In these unprecedented times, there is a precedent, and that precedent is that when workers know their worth, agitate for better and for more, when they hold out and unite, they force the elites to loosen the reigns, giving more power, autonomy, rights, and profits back into the hands of the workers, and with that freedom, society improves.

Know your worth. Know that you have bargaining power. Let's make this pandemic part of the precedent. <3

👆 “Historically, the labour shortage created by pandemics means a heightened bargaining capacity for workers of all sorts - an if there was ever a time to take advantage of knowing history, it's now. Because the thing is, in these "unprecedented times" there are precedents, and the precedent leans toward workers. “