⚠️flash warning⚠️

dolores just wants to sleep

Teachers have tried this and are amazed when their classes don’t go feral like in the book.  It’s almost as if the book was supposed to be satire and not a treaty on the nature of humanity.

there’s a timeskip

THERE’S A TIMESKIP

THERE’S A TIMESKIP

THERE’S A TIMESKIP

after losing control of the signal fire there’s a FUCKING TIMESKIP and when the next chapter starts everyone’s hair is several inches longer and their clothes have rotted to shreds and they’re still just kind of chilling!!!!

IT TAKES THE TERRIBLE IMPERIALISM MIND-POISONED EXCESSIVELY BRITISH BOYS IN THE ACTUAL BOOK SEVERAL MONTHS TO COMMIT A SINGLE ACT OF INTENTIONAL VIOLENCE, EVEN THE ONE (1) CHILD WRITTEN AS AN ACTUAL SOCIOPATH

AND then when they DO turn on each other it is because

THERE’S AN UNSPECIFIED WORLD WAR HAPPENING

AND A PILOT’S CORPSE CRASH LANDS ON THE ISLAND POST-DOGFIGHT AND THE CHILDREN MISTAKE THE PARACHUTE FOR A MONSTER AND SPIRAL INTO PARANOIA

BECAUSE CHILDREN INHERIT THE LEGACY AND TRAUMA OF VIOLENCE FROM THE ADULTS WAGING WAR AROUND THEM

HURR DURR IN THE REAL WORLD IT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN LIKE IN LORD OF THE FLIES -

IT DIDN’T HAPPEN THAT WAY IN LORD OF THE FLIES EITHER YOU JUST HAVEN’T READ IT SINCE HIGH SCHOOL IF EVER AND DON’T REMEMBER WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED IN THE GODDAMN BOOK

#tbf the dude wrote it to be a dick

yes. yes he did. i’m also gonna direct you to the real life ‘lord of the flies’ which occured in the 1960s, when six tongan schoolboys got stranded on a desert island for over a year before being rescued by an australian fisherman (who, it should be noted, later took on all six as crewmembers because the reason they were out in the first place was because they wanted to see the world, and named his ship the Ata after the island they were stranded on). nobody died. the only injuries that occurred were accidental, and when one of the boys broke his leg falling down a cliff, the others braced it and looked after him so well that it healed perfectly. if they argued, then they would literally go to opposite sides of the island until they’d cooled off. after leaving the island, they remained friends for the rest of their lives. here’s a photo of them as adults, with their rescuer (who is third from the left) and other members of his crew.

i read about this in rutger bregman’s human kind, a book i cannot recommend highly enough, but if you don’t want to go and read a whole book about the inherent goodness of humanity (which again, you really should) then the relevant excerpt can be found here.

ok WOW definitely consider reading the article, these boys–Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano–showed tremendous cooperation as well as the ability to share and farm scarce resources, and to care for each other in times of sickness and injury. Not only that, by the time they were finally rescued, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.”

They were all between the ages of 13 and 16 at the time of the shipwreck. And from the very beginning they recognized the importance of co-operation and resource-sharing–starting with sharing rainwater equally while they were adrift for 8 days without food or fresh water.

And here is an interview with one of the survivors (Sione Totau, now 73 years old)

HEADS UP- TERF PLAGARISM

THIS is a lovely, kind, fun, well researched book by a trans author/artist, with therapist consultation, designed to help trans or nonbinary folks enjoy exploration of their gender. It was published October 2020.

And THIS is a promotional tweet for a hideous, lazy copy that pretty obviously used the color-picker and general concept of the first, in order to sneak gender-essentialist TERF propaganda into teen and preteen book spaces. It was published today- October 16th, 2021.

Note the “transgendertrend” username, and the preying on ableism to especially target caregivers of autistic kids with their undermining.

This isn’t a suable offense, but it still offensive. And sad to say, but exposing the obvious cribbing may prove to some people that these folks are not acting in good faith, have no original ideas in their head, and are, in general, lazy and disingenuous as all hell.

So, please join me in exhausted outrage, help spread the word, and maybe let these yahoos know what you think of their integrity.

the best gag in dracula by far is how the entire time jonathan harker is imprisoned in dracula’s castle, dracula is pretending to have a full household of servants when in reality it’s just him running around doing everything, and it would be CRIMINAL to write a drac-centric adaptation and not milk this gag for all it’s worth. dracula dropping off harker in the carriage, pulling into the stables, then sprinting through the castle to answer the front door. dracula lurking outside harker’s bedroom for him to leave so he can sneak in and make his bed and fold his pajamas. dracula in the kitchen struggling to make food when he hasn’t eaten anything except blood in centuries. dracula giving up, turning into a bat in frustration, flapping over to the nearest farmhouse, stealing a pie off the windowsill, and proudly presenting it to harker for dinner.

It’s legit because you know his brides would absolutely not help him with the charade. They are sitting back laughing as they sip their wine glasses full of child’s blood, knowing full well how to make a pie (you don’t just forget how to be an amazing baker even after centuries of unlife) but far too gleeful to see him struggle to help in any way.

My newsletter about my yay-for-HRT T(ea) party is now available! Click through for queer joy, thoughts on why we SHOULD celebrate transition milestones, and as a randomish bonus, previews of my elaborate animated book trailer, because yes I am still working on that. 

And yes, These are actual pictures from my actual party, not nabbed from elsewhere, I promise. So much baking.

Newsletter is here: https://buttondown.email/LeeBrontide/archive/what-do-we-celebrate/

My small but growing archive is here: https://buttondown.email/LeeBrontide/archive/

Subscription, should you feel so inclined, is here: https://buttondown.email/LeeBrontide

(And yes, I know it’s weird to do a tumblr post linking to a newsletter. But I have been burned by TOO MANY social media platforms in my 38 years on this planet and it has made me paranoid and crotchety.)

my dad–also a writer–came to visit, and i mentioned that the best thing to come out of the layoff is that i’m writing again. he asked what i was writing about, and i said what i always do: “oh, just fanfic,” which is code for “let’s not look at this too deeply because i’m basically just making action figures kiss in text form” and “this awkward follow-up question is exactly why i don’t call myself a writer in public.”

he said, “you have to stop doing that.”

“i know, i know,” because it’s even more embarrassing to be embarrassed about writing fanfic, considering how many posts i’ve reblogged in its defense.

but i misunderstood his original question: “fanfic is just the genre. i asked what you’re writing about.” 

i did the conversational equivalent of a spinning wheel cursor for at least a minute. i started peeling back the setting and the characters, the fic challenge and the specific episode the story jumps off from, and it was one of those slow-dawning light bulb moments. “i’m writing about loneliness, and who we are in the absence of purpose.”

as, i imagine, are a lot of people right now, who probably also don’t realize they’re writing an existential diary in the guise of getting television characters to fuck. 

“that’s what you’re writing. the rest is just how you get there, and how you get it out into the world. was richard iii really about richard the third? would shakespeare have gotten as many people to see it if it wasn’t a story they knew?”

so, my friends: what are you writing about?

Well….. fuck…now that you put it that way….

i almost finished 300,000 words before i realized i was essentially writing about how hard it is to make friends after age 35. and how much i need to.

I’ve been stalled for nearly a year but I’ve been writing about found family and escaping your trauma and coming into yourself as a young adult in a life you never expected to have, and I’m writing about love and loyalty and letting yourself heal from the things that have hurt you, and I’m writing about identity and how to find yours in the face of discovering you’re not the person you didn’t years thinking you were.

…. Holy shit man I don’t know what to do with this knowledge.

I’m writing about the impulse to build our future into a better world, even as the past can hold us back, and fear and greed can destroy it.

stop using hospitals as horror settings

fun alternative: cruise ships. cruise ships exploit workers and can pollute as much as a million cars on a daily basis while dumping endless shit into the ocean and endangering all passengers on board because the on board air quality rivals some of the most polluted cities in the world while being a breeding ground for disease. cruise ships deserve to have negativity associated with them

also all crimes commited aboard a cruise ship is under the juristiction of whichever country they’re registered to once they’re a certain distance away from land so you have the added bonus of the crimes being very unlikely to be properly investigated (due to usually being physically so very far from the actual police whose juristiction they’re under)

terrifying!

On top of THAT cruise ships tend to have their own morgue, as people tend to die on ships all the time. Good for those spooky scenes.

plus u can just like…leave a hospital. good luck escaping a killer or a monster or a curse or w/e in the middle of the fucking ocean

As an ex cruise ship employee, let me give you some stuff to work with!

Water tight doors! You get a special training video on interacting with these correctly because they will literally cut you in half if you try and go through them while they’re closing!

Freezer vaults for food in the sub decks - you can only get into these with the correct code and they have very thick walls. Good luck if you get shut in one of these just after the last round of checks bucko

There are cameras everywhere…except in the crew cabin corridors. Also there are no windows down there because unless you’re an officer, you live below the waterline. Day and night have no meaning because everything is in the same slightly unsettling yellow light.

Don’t piss off the guys who deal with the rubbish. They have machines down there that can crush metal barrels

As well as morgues, cruise ships usually have one basic operating theatre with all the attendant horrifying equipment in it

One cigarette thrown carelessly in the wrong place WILL start a fire that will gut half the ship.

When we’re pitching side to side, the anchor swings out and then back in, striking the metal outer shell with a noise that shakes half the ship

People disappear overboard more often than you’d really want to be a thing

A lot of cruise ships now have theatres on board (usually towards the front) with all the potential for dark corners, creepy costumes and electrical calamities you could want.

And as op says, you can’t really escape a ship in the middle of the ocean. Particularly during a storm, as then you can’t even evacuate to lifeboats unless the whole ship is going down. On the upside being on board during a storm means most guests hide in their cabins and the staff walk around like drunks, which would likely throw off a skilled murderer’s plans.

Takes notes

You also have the bonus of a corporate overlord who doesn’t give a shit about anything but profits and can be reliably counted on to downplay any disaster in an attempt to avoid publicity.

Ok but just saying that with a hospital you also have the bonus of a corporate overlord who doesn’t give a shit about anything but profits and can be reliably counted on to downplay any disaster in an attempt to avoid publicity.

I’ve been researching hospital power structures for a WIP and…whooo.

But seriously tho stop making hospital patients into horror movie boogiemen. Not cool.

Why is this even a question? How is your child meant to learn to apologize when you don’t do it yourself as a parent?

This is actually a really important factor in how I establish healthy, trusting relationships with kiddos at work. I am a human and therefore make mistakes, which children will catch and call me out for, because children are information sponges with no verbal filters.

When a kid says, “but miss tommy, i thought you said we’re not supposed to do that,” I answer, “You’re right. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that. I won’t do it again.” It could be something small, maybe a kid sees me biting my nails, or maybe I grabbed a kid by the arm who was about to collide with something solid but I grabbed too hard. Whatever it is, it’s important to

Not only does this model HOW to make an effective apology, but it establishes trust on many levels. The children who witness the exchange now know that:

Apologize to your kids when you mess up! It won’t diminish your authority as their grown-up, it shows that you respect that authority!

This is one thing emotionally abusive parents are known for. Holding power over accountability and they wonder why their children don’t want to be around when they get older.

We apologize to each other in our home. We model it between the adults so she sees EVERYONE says sorry.

And if we get angry or frustrated? We apologize for using an angry voice and take ownership of the emotion and either do a do over or use restorative justice.

We can’t ask the kiddos in our house to do something we don’t.

I’m flabbergasted that this is even a question. That’s like asking “Do you want your kid to be unbearable for others to be around OR emotionally abused?” Apologize to your kids, fam! Teach them by example.

So when I was like, 8, I was playing with my dad one evening, and he lost his wristwatch in the process. We cleaned up before bed, and the next morning he realized his watch was missing.

Back then, because I’m old, a wristwatch was actually a really important and useful, as well as expensive object. Rushing out the door to work, he ended up tossing every toy y sister and I owned on the floor, looking for it. I remember so vividly sitting on the couch, watching him doing this, and telling him “mom will be mad”. He promised me he would explain it to her before he left the house.

He forgot. Mom came in, saw that our recently cleaned room was a total and utter disaster and, as fortold, got mad. I tried to tell her DAD had made the big mess. I suspect I didn’t explain it very well, because she’s generally someone who listens to me and trusts me. She made me clean up the whole mess myself and I was as resentful and bitter as my little 8 year old heart knew how to be.

That evening, my dad comes home, and I angrily tell him what happened, and that he forgot to tell mom.

He didn’t hesitate for a moment to apologize to me, sincerely and earnestly. Then he explained the situation to my mom, in front of me, so I could see him take accountability. Mom then also apologized to me for not believing me. I think the promised me one free mess that they would clean up after me, but my memory gets a little hazy around that point.

The main thing I remember about this, is that I walked away with a sense that if I was wronged, I deserved an apology and for someone to try to make it right. AND I walked away with a warm cozy sense of trust that if my parents were the ones who wronged me, they would treat me with kindness and respect and do their best to fix it. It’s that sort of thing that has kept my relationship with them both so good, even now I’m well into middle age.

My life is very much improved with the well ingrained expectation that I deserve respect, and with good models of HOW to be respectful to others. They didn’t just tell me to be respectful. They showed me how it was done.

And now, that’s a guiding principle in my own parenting.

I thought I posted a few of these before, but it it looks like I didn’t?

For those just joining now, I’m making an excessively ambitious animated trailer for my first book (Secondhand Origin Stories, which is actually already out, but whatever, I’m aiming to finish this by the time the sequel releases.). These are some of the backgrounds I’ve been putting together to that end, in various stages of completion. Please excuse missing relevant details- some of those details are destined to be covered by the figures I’m not yet posting.

I’m really pleased with how these are coming out, overall. They have a few tweaks yet but hey I can’t show you everything before I release the trailer, right?

I really wanted to give the whole thing a cinematic flair, without loosing the moody, introspective vibe of the book. I’m finding this kind of visual worldbuilding and character building really rewarding. I can go over the top with that in a way that wasn’t feasible when I was doing comics. I feel like once the more visible scifi/superhero elements are added (mainly via the figures) it’ll really showcase my story as a grounded, character driven kind of scifi, which is pretty much my whole deal.

I hope you like them!

Work on the trailer continues, but by bit! At this point I’m even starting to do character animation that doesn’t involve rotoscoping. Eventually I’ll figure out how to export GIFs so I can actually show you all some movement.

I’m sorry, I just am really proud of this cluttered room. Thanks to the real current and former teens who contributed to it’s development. I crammed a lot of low key character bits into this one- a lot more than Jamie’s pristine Pottery Barn Catalogue of a bedroom.

I just keep muttering to myself about how I’m going to have simple character designs, and simple backgrounds, and limited movement and then I start messing with reflections and perspective and rotoscoping and I know I have lost all control over this project that was ridiculous to begin with but I can’t stop now.

Aliens have captured you, and placed you in one of their nature preserves. However, they have sorely miscalculated on two issues: The amount of calories needed to keep a persistence predator sated, and the lethality/brutality of a hangry human.

first alien scientist in hover car: i don’t understand, all these creatures thrived together in the original environment, why is it eating them to extinction here?

second alien scientist: maybe we should add more crayfish? it ate the whole population in one sitting, that was kind of a surprise.

me, without looking up from scraping a caribou hide: i can hear you, assholes.

alien scientists: (staring)

me: yeah, i learned your language. you keep sitting there talking about me like i can’t hear you, that’s gonna happen.

first scientist: fascinating. we knew you were arguably sentient, but… (making notes)

second scientist: why are you eating everything? your food requirement in your home environment was less than half this.

me: i didn’t have to catch it myself, you idiots! you yoinked me out of the middle of a camping trip! i bought all that food at a store! i bought my CLOTHES at a store. i bought my BEDDING at a store. I DID NOT HAVE TO KILL MY OWN TENT.

me, finally looking up, shaking a flint knife at them: what the hell kind of scientists could go to earth and not notice the dominant species lives in cities? did you just swoop by in a hurry and grab everything out of the park without looking?

scientists: (silence)

me: … oh my god.

scientists: we’re grad students.

I need this as a film.

i propose aldis hodge as the camper

I love this. Kind of like an inverted Predator. I want to know more about this character and his flint knapping because that isn’t a usual skill. (And how he picked up the language and so on. I imagine him grumbling to himself as he tries to spell what he’s hearing phoenetically with a stick.)

ok i confess i was envisioning not aldis hodge the actor, but alec hardison the character, so like… mega genius memelord, probably watched ‘primitive technology’ and ‘how to make everything’ in a side window while he worked. not because he was especially interested in primitive survival, but because he ran out of mythbusters.

so he kinda absorbed it peripherally but never practiced it. then he’s out on a fishing trip and aliens just up and gank the whole park.

they watch as he eats the food he brought, and that’s their data for his caloric needs. but he’s eating that while sitting in his camp trying to figure out wtf happened with nothing but his third best laptop, a phone with no signal, and a solar charger. (he figures out a surprising amount this way. he is a genius.) once he runs out of freeze dried mac n cheese, he has to live on what he can catch and forage. he is… not the greatest fisherman.  this ‘fishing’ trip was supposed to be an excuse  to doze on the lakeshore and brainstorm his next programming project. it was the middle of summer in the northwoods – too late for fiddleheads and cattail shoots, too early for berries and fruit.

there is a hilarious ‘wrong mushroom’ episode.

okay, so he’s getting pretty hungry. one or two fish sticks a day and some boiled shelf mushrooms is not cutting it. the aliens who keep hovering around talking about him occasionally drop him some rations, but they’re copies of his camping food, and also they sometimes don’t, because they’re studying his ‘hunting techniques’.

he finds a stream with crayfish. they are SO EASY TO CATCH. he is full for like three days! then there are no more crayfish. he is the crawdad extinction event; good job dude.

all this time, between attempts at hunting and gathering, he’s trying to reconstruct what he halfway learned off youtube. it takes practice, but he’s got nothing but time. when the aliens eventually take away his tent to see how he makes his own shelter, he’s more than ready to stab some megafauna. he fire-hardens a pointy stick and just goes for it.

killing the caribou is surprisingly easy. watching it die is surprisingly hard. butchering it is a smelly mess but eating a fresh grilled steak for the first time in months is GLORIOUS.

it takes about a year to learn the aliens’ language. genius or no, he doesn’t have any references except the few words their actions explain, so even full immersion is a real slow start. once he begins to pick up vocab, though, the rest comes faster. these aliens are real chatterboxes. they’ll sit there in their floaty thing for HOURS arguing with each other, and they both think out loud.

he learns plenty of swear words when he uses a hide he accidentally ruined as a canvas and paints a cartoon of the aliens having a baby fight.

though he’s not confident in his accent, the day he overhears them admitting they have no idea what he needs to eat and aren’t starving him on purpose, he is DONE. they are going to get a piece of his mind. this is the worst. vacation. ever.

The August newsletter is OUT but don’t despair, the archives are always available. This month I talked about a book series that was foundational to me as a person, it’s upcoming adaptation for TV, and the complicated feelings I got in re-reading it. It also contains actual photographic evidence of me at age 15, looking like the baby queer I was. 

You know what? Bring back the Mary Sues. Bring them back. All of them. Give me endless self-indulgent, angsty-backstory, improbably attractive and correct protagonists. Let them have weird colored eyes and the cheekbones of gods. Let their tragedy be treated with the reverence of the most enshrined sagas, and their romances burn like the planets core. I am re-reading a terrible book I loved as a teenager in the 90s and I am LIVING.

Give EVERY kid a book where they get to attach to a blatant reader standin and give them that feeling of transcendence to hold in their heart forever.

VIVA LA MARY SUE!

even if billie joe was straight (he’s not) teenagers getting offended he used the word faggot in american idiot 16 years after the fact would still be some of the goofiest discourse i have yet to see on this website. if you were young and gay in 2004 that shit rocked your world bc we were living through one of the most powerful resurgences of blind american patriotism and anti-gay evangelical bullshit of the last three decades. i dont think most of yall understand how radical that song, that album, and green day’s overall anti-bush pro-gay stance was for the time. even though we were at the cusp of bush becoming unpopular by the time it was released, american idiot saw a fairly mainstream rock band condemning not just him, but the bigoted, ignorant american culture which created him. to remove all of this context from the song and act like green day was just throwing around homophobic slurs for the hell of it is exactly why people joke nobody has reading comprehension on this website lmao. he’s not weaponizing the term; he’s using it to identify with an alternative american society.

The lyric is:

Well maybe I'm the faggot America

I'm not a part of a redneck agenda

I don't know how to explain to kids these days what it was like to be young and queer in those days. People think I call myself queer because I've never lived in a small and homophobic town, never experienced violence or discrimination, don't know what it's like to have those words thrown at me with anger and hatred.

And it's hard to reach through the pain of those memories and say: there were no words for us that weren't slurs when I was your age.

I was 17 when this song came out. "Gay" was what the boys in my high school called anything they didn't like. "Pop quiz? That's so gay!" A (straight) girl in the drama club shaved her head for cancer and people started calling her a dyke. Her car got egged in the school parking lot and the eggs stayed there long enough to wreck the paint but somehow "nobody saw". The teachers and principal of my Catholic school didn't do anything about that, or about the abuse my gay friend put up with in the halls and every class except drama, because intervening would be "endorsing homosexuality." My gay friend got shipped off to conversion therapy by his family and I never saw him again. Conservative classmates tried to get the drama teacher fired, because she "wasn't supportive of Catholic values."

The only story I knew about gay people in a town like mine was The Laramie Project, about Matthew Sheppard's murder for being gay in a small town in Wyoming. That was the year I started but couldn't finish a play titled "The Lemon Tree" about two girls whose love for each other couldn't survive the homophobia of a town like mine, the same way a lemon tree planted there would be killed stone dead by its harsh winters. It was the year I decided to convert to Catholicism, because I had sincere faith and yes the Church was homophobic but having a real relationship with a woman was never going to be possible for me anyway so it wasn't like I was losing anything, right?

I didn't have access to the gay community or gay media, except through online slash fandom. A year later I found a second depiction of gay people in a town like mine: Brokeback Mountain, about two men whose love was smothered by society's homophobia until one of them was murdered for being gay.

(Now I know that kd lang and Tegan and Sara were openly gay in the 90s and come from my part of the world, although they all had to leave to be successful. Nobody mentioned kd lang's sexuality, and Tegan and Sara didn't get radio play here when I was young.)

And yes, "faggot" was worse than "gay". "Gay" just meant, you know, "bad", but "faggot" meant gay and soft and weak and about to get an ass-kicking.

So I remember those lines and when I first heard them all those years ago. I remember that I was cleaning my room and listening to the radio, and the DJ talked about Green Day's anger at cable news and the war in Iraq and played the song, and those two lines hit me, so hard I was incredulous and couldn't believe that for once somebody was on my side.

Green Day's image was tough and angry and loud, and it's an angry song—not unexpected, basically anyone left-leaning was angry about politics then—and them saying "maybe I'm the faggot" was them saying Come and get me. You can't scare me. This thing you throw out as an insult and a threat? Yeah, I'll own it, and I'll use it to lure you into punching range. You're wrong and I can fight you and win.

It was like a transmission from an alien planet. This was someone so much braver than I could ever imagine being. What that song said to me was that somebody was willing to stand up for me. I had viewed homophobia as an all-powerful cultural force I could either submit to or escape by hiding until I found a safe community, but pro-LGBT punk rock was what taught me that I also had the option to fight.

Good news: if you’re currently laying around and not producing anything, you are a credit to your species.

I’m an ant biologist and I’d like to point out that ants also spend a significant percentage of the time doing nothing.

Turns out sometimes the most evolutionary useful thing you can do is chill and not wear yourself to shreds, whether mammal or insect. It helps you deal with emergencies and adapt to change. Plus, you can act as living food storage!

That last part is probably more an ant thing than a human thing, but hey, live your dreams.

it’s also a bear thing, which absolutely explains me

Doing absolutely fuck-all is how antarctic sea sponges live to be over 10,000 years old, so live your best, longest, laziest life.

Remember lions? Fellow apex predators?

Yeah, they spend 16-20 hours of the day laying around, socializing, raising Cubs and napping.

The last 4-8 hours are spent hunting.

Wait wait, they’re not a primate so they don’t count.

How about Orangutans?

Well, they spend 90% of their time awake just hanging out in food-rich areas, eating fruit and leaves, socializing, raising children, and chilling.

Well, they’re not people so it doesn’t-

How about Stone Age people in Europe?

They probably worked 3-5 hours per day, every day. (Though seasonal changes in food scarcity could change that)

Laborers in ancient Egypt worked 8 hours, with an hour break at lunch. They did this for 8 days, then rested 2 days. That sounds familiar. Except… they also had regular time off for festivals and holidays, and only worked for about 18 out of every 50 days.

Artisans in imperial Rome generally worked from 6am to Noon, and then had the rest of the day off… and only worked for half the year, due to all the holidays and festivals they got off.

But that’s too easy, what about a Peasant in medieval England?

6-8 hours per day, with Sundays off, Farm workers put in longer hours at harvest time but worked shorter days in winter when there are fewer hours of daylight. Economist Juliet Schor estimates that in the period following the Plague they worked no more than 150 days a year, due to the long holidays and many festivals.

Ugh, let’s go poorer. 17th century France. Starvation was afoot for the working poor!

During the reign of King Louis XIV, the workers of France had it tough, and hunger for the poorest was a fact of life. The typical working day was as much as 12 hours long, but two hours were set aside midday for lunch and perhaps an afternoon nap. Nevertheless, the Ancient Régime is said to have also guaranteed peasants, labourers and other workers a total of 52 Sundays, 90 rest days and 38 religious holidays off per year, meaning they worked just 185 out of 365 days.

So what changed?

The industrial revolution, baybe~~

New factory owners could work their employees to the bone due to a lack of regulation and abundance of cheap labour.

The typical factory worker in mid 19th-century England toiled away for a soul-destroying 16 hours a day, six days a week, 311 days per year!

THAT nightmare became the standard by which western society began to judge “work-life balance” and anything gentler than the industrial factory’s unfettered brutality is considered “softness”

(So many people died being mangled in those machines. Hair handkerchiefs went into style during American industrialization because working women would otherwise get their hair caught in the machines, and be either scalped or be bodily pulled inside to die…. But that’s a horror for another time)

Americans in 2020 worked an average of 8.5 hours per day on weekdays, plus another 5 hours on weekends.

Taking out federal holidays and weekends, we work 262 days per year. Most of us get 5-9 sick days to take per year. (Yes, a fixed number, no matter how sick you really are), and usually either no paid vacation, or 7-15 days paid vacation, depending on seniority and the company. Unpaid vacation doesn’t have a max, but taking it often risks you getting fired.

Even comparing against the poorest laborers in ancient history the current working structure for humans is, frankly, inhumane.

We are mammals. Let us rest. Let us celebrate holidays and attend festivals. Let us attend to our homes and families.

Even the ultra wealthy folks who got their heads chopped off gave us more time off than this!!!

Someone in the comments said something like “humans are instinctively industrious and productive, as social creatures!”

Buddy, that’s a lie fed to you by capitalism.

In our default state, we attend to our families yes, but we also party like hell, lounge around, and make fantastic works of art just to be proud of ourselves. We made beautiful things for the joy of creating them.

Stone Age humans may have spent a couple hours hunting and gathering, but DEFINITELY spent loads of time painting every available surface. Time and weather washed most of it away, but some places like Arizona and Colorado still preserve a few of the endless murals made by ancient hands.

Evidence shows that the ancient world was COVERED in paintings and etchings - just saturated with images of birds and beasts and humans, sunsets and cool weather. We invented mythologies and painted about them. We did something impressive, and painted about it. We taught our children how to paint and lifted them into our shoulders so they could mark the ceiling.

In our most base state, humans will work enough to survive, but our instincts demand we use all other time to create art. We want to communicate. To make connections.

“Working” or “being productive” is not on that list.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

*GASPS* Are you goddamn kidding me??? I fucking hate the lack of infrastructure in my country. God.

Dude if I could take a train 400 miles anywhere I would pay 14 dollars just for a seat, never mind all those amenities. Jeez.

Reasons I remind myself I don’t like my country number who knows what

While this is super cool in and of itself, I’d also like to remind people that modern high speed rail (most of which is in China these days) operates at around 200 miles/hour (China’s fastest train actually operates at 370+ mph but that’s an absolute state of the art maglev, the 200 mph number is average rail speed). If we actually invested in these train systems, you wouldn’t even need an overnight ticket to make a 400 mile trip. To put that in an American context, it would allow you to get from New York to Los Angeles (the famous Cannonball Run taken by car enthusiasts for decades) in about 15 hours, which is 10 hours better than the current Cannonball Run record. With that kind of speed, you could take an evening train halfway across the country (Boston to Chicago would be ~5 hours) for a weekend trip.

Trains are not just more convenient (no driving!), but technologically superior to cars.

Tara Houska (zhaabowekwe), social media, 8 July 2021. Text reads:

This is the Mississippi River headwaters right now. Minnesota in a severe drought. Enbridge is taking 5 BILLION gallons of water from our rivers & lakes to drill Line 3 pipeline thru. […]

fucking Enbridge is airing commercials on mpls radio claiming that everything they’re doing is accepted by native people and they’ve been listening to native people SO HARD trust us you guys and it’s SO FUCKING DISGUSTING

Anyone here who lives in the US needs to send messages to the MN legislature right now. I’ll get you started, here’s how you can contact the governor AND Lt. gov: https://mn.gov/governor/contact/

There’s a million reasons to defend the Mississippi: Her cultural significance, the fact she supports mifwestern wildlife, the fact we don’t want to lose a whole ass river… But if you can’t muster up enough to care about it for any of the regular reasons, consider the fact you will almost certainly starve. Please take the 5 minutes to send an email, I can’t do this on my own.

Hi, I posted something like this before but more exposure can’t hurt. My family lives on one of the affected reservations in Minnesota. This is what their wild rice harvesting grounds (the world’s largest fyi) look like this year.

They took almost 5 billion gallons of water. They constantly fuck with the protestors. Wild rice isn’t just an economic thing for them, there is a deeply spiritual connection. Enbridge is awful, please help however you can, even if it’s just reblogging.

Salt of the Earth (1954), dir. Herbert J. Biberman

Damn, son.

EVERYONE SHOULD WATCH SALT OF THE EARTH

Salt of the Earth actually has a crazy interesting history- OP already said it was made in 1954, but that was in the middle of the Red Scare (communism scary cold war hysteria)

Congress’s anti-communism target fell hard on Hollywood, and those in the industry who were suspected of communism at all were blacklisted from all jobs, because studio’s didn’t want to face backlash from Congress

Salt of the Earth was made nearly 100% with blacklisted crew members from Hollywood, and had such difficulty finding actors that they hired local citizens and miners from the actual strike the plot is based on. There were only 5 trained actors involved, and one of them (Rosaura Revueltas, the woman in the gif) was deported to Mexico before they finished filming on accusations of communism, with no proof and no substance. The filming was plagued with police harassment and threats (according to my professor they were shot at more than once), and the local union hall was burned down.

The movie itself not only covers a real 1950′s labor strike demanding safer and more equal labor conditions for Mexican-American employees, but after the miners were facing arrest, their wives and children took up the strike in their place. The movie’s combination of blacklisted crew, civil rights and feminist message, and pro-union plot (during the red scare) got the movie blacklisted and only 12 theaters in the entire United States would show the movie- it was successful in Europe, but didn’t actually achieve viewership in the US until the 60′s

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/10/salt-of-the-earth-labour-workers-blacklisted-filmmakers

It is available on YouTube for free

It’s not that I filter most of the sentimentality out of my speech because I’m embarrassed by it. Nothing in the world is less embarrassing to me than love or admiration or joy. But expressing the joy and love I feel to the full extent I feel them would leave me with no time left for anything else. And then how would I help provide for my beautiful wife, with her flashing dark eyes and hair like rough seas at night? How would I raise my perfect daughter with her peach-like cheeks and songbird laugh? How would I maintain my lovely old house with it’s cozy corners and freshly planted garden? I have responsibilities. Most of them I’ve taken more than willingly, but they still have their demands on my time. 

So sometimes I have to tune out the baroque symphony of a thunderstorm, or pass by a flower blooming out of season as if I don’t see it peeking at me from under the grass, or, God forbid, not pause to smell every single lilac I pass.

Just please assume that if I seem distracted, or if my enthusiasm strains your faith in my sincerity, that I am trying very hard to get by in a world that moves faster than my racing heart can appreciate it.

supervillains fucking hate fighting the x-men because the teams change constantly and sometimes there are??? totally new people there???? fuck there’s a teenager who literally just has eyes all over his body. is he even technically a superhero yet or is he a student. who the fuck knows. how do we counter this shit

When one seems completely non-mutated and they’re like

@melazertyiop

And no matter which team it is, Wolverine is there. Is it the future? Wolverine is there. Is it an alternate reality? Wolverine is there. Is Wolverine dead? Wolverine is there.

Was Wolverine never born in this alternate reality? Wolverine is there.

Does Wolverine only exist as a non corporeal spirit? Wolverine is there.

Is Wolverine only a philosophical construct used to explain our place in an uncaring universe? Wolverine is there.

Is Wolverine only a theological concept used to explain mankind’s struggle against the universe? Wolverine is there.

Is Wolverine there? Another Wolverine is also there.

And let’s not forget when the villains just switch sides. Last week this guy was on your side now he’s next to Wolverine and kicking your ass. 

The only constant is Wolverine.

There are three constants in life: death, taxes, and Wolverine.

This entire thread sounds like Magneto woke up at 3am, wrote the whole thing with his eyes closed, then rolled over and went back to sleep.

Maybe the real Wolverine was the enemies we made along the way.