"You're risking a lot, you know. Going up against them like this."
"What am I risking, really? I haven't promised anything to them and if they try to accuse me of anything they don't have a leg to stand on. I haven't broken any laws or rules since I came here."
Ice delivery man in Houston, TX circa 1920 Check this blog!
why did he eat this
Historian finishing a dissertation on the ice industry here. For once, I am not here to take away your joy! “Oh no, the ice man is too sexy and he’s going to fuck my wife while I’m not home” was a legit moral panic for DECADES. So much so that if you were fancy, you could get an icebox built into your wall so the dirty, sexy ice man didn’t have to come inside your house with your delicate, impressionable wife. This pic is going in the diss if I can chase down the correct citation for it.
This is what people mean when they say Murderbot's an unreliable narrator: what it says about its own views and beliefs is contradicted in key places by what it tells us it did, and by how it reacts to the treatment of other characters. "I don't care," it says, and then it shows us that it cares enough to put its own life on the line for someone it just met. "I don't care," it tells us, and then when someone refuses to leave it behind it never forgets her; when people treat it as a teammate and not a tool it is the best teammate they could ask for. It changes its opinion as it learns new things. It does things sometimes, and doesn't always understand its own reasons.
The power of an "unreliable" narrator comes from understanding the power of a narrative device. Murderbot is a character, and not a real celebrity or spokesperson or mouthpiece, and because it's not a real person it can reflect the personhood of real people with real complexity, and thus invoke our empathy for it. Real people are allowed to contradict themselves, to be occasional hypocrites with blind spots, to change their opinions. What it says ("I don't care") and what it does (show an incredible amount of care) don't line up, and so it is an unreliable narrator at the same time that it's not one at all- or only one as much as anyone (and especially anyone struggling with depression, which can warp your self-perception) is an unreliable narrator of their own experience.
god forbid women do anything
I’d laugh, but if I earn £1 over £139, I lose my entire Carers Allowance for the week, and get fined an additional £50, even if it’s because of a really stupid reason such as “I didn’t realise I was entitled to holiday pay when I swapped that shift” (because carers don’t get holiday pay) or “I also didn’t realise I got time and a half for that bank holiday” (guess what else carers don’t get) so I find it increasingly difficult to smile and laugh and joke about it when yet another fucking Tory gets away with blatant theft and no consequences.
Anyway, it’s local elections day. Grab your it’s-totally-not-voter-suppression photo ID and vote out your local bastard Tory!
No, I'm reblogging this one too.
The damage the Tories have done to this country is nauseating. They've implemented change that has thrown people already in desperate circumstances even further under the bus.
Old women riding the bus all day because they can't heat their homes, people in full time employment still having to use food banks, the sinister gutting of the NHS, the vile, violent racism which is just part of the Tory party.
These people were complaining about the cost of heating their fucking stables.
The process for claiming disability benefits is SO humiliating and arduous and heartless that people have committed suicide because of it.
If you read this and thought 'aw, she's a cheeky little girl bossing imp' and not 'Tories consider £1200 nothing but refuse to pay up anyway' idk what the fuck is wrong with you.
This isn't cute. She, and the whole Tory party, have blood on their hands and they do. Not. Give. A. Fuck.
Sharecropping.
FYI if your employer does this, if they have done it for a long time especially, you and your coworkers could be owed huge amounts of unpaid wages and it would be an easy suit if there is a paper trail like this and your employer is placing strict requirements on your behavior while not at work. Employment lawyers generally work on contingency. Just food for thought.
while the WGA and SAG-AFTRA are on strike, production and support staff in two different parts of the mouse, Disney Animation Studios and 20th Century TV Animation, have been campaigning to be included in the Animation Guild with their animator and writer colleagues. companies like disney try to falsely segment certain workers in industries off, saying they are too different and wont recognize them as a part of the union, as a union busting tactic. it’s been MONTHS for one group and over a YEAR for another, that disney has ignored them. they’re asking for people to sign two petitions and talk about it online:
production workers deserve protections the same as animators and writers and ALL of them are further protected and can do better work if they can organize together. spread the word!
"Anarchist" but gets triggered when people voluntarily don't wear bicycle helmets.
Me when I know what anarchy is
Gravity legally cannot hurt you if you scream "NO GODS NO MASTERS" immediately before impact
I'm so fucking tired of this bicycle helmet discourse. Bike helmets aren't going to do shit to protect you if you get hit by a car
Most of the time... Bike accidents.... Involve things.... Other than cars...... like the ground....also it's safety gear..... Wearing it is non negotiable.... You are one accident away from being permanently disabled..... You need to protect your brain
Not towards OP
Is OSHA and other safety regulations also cop behavior?
*sigh* The belief that OSHA and other safety regulations are cop behavior are common opinions that people have, anarchist or not. Wearing PPE is annoying and often uncomfortable, sweaty, and cumbersome. People also generally hate being told to be careful, because they believe that "be careful" is synonymous with "hey, you're too stupid to do that without hurting yourself".
But all it takes is one time for you to slip up and suddenly the grinder disk that would have gotten stuck in your safety glasses is in your eye, or you're getting treated for lung cancer because you didn't want to wear your respirator while you welded. These are decisions that you were free to make, but might seriously regret later on.
People will scream until they're blue in the face about how oppressive it is to have to wear a safety vest and hard hat on a construction site, but do you really think that the hammer that slipped out of your buddy's hand is going to take that into consideration when it collides with your skull?
No political theory will save you from an accident. You can either wear your PPE, or can die, unexpectedly, painfully, and slowly. The choice is yours. Go argue with a lathe if you feel so strongly about it.
somehow instead of saying "as a treat", I've started using the phrase "for morale", as if my body is a ship and its crew, and I (the captain) have to keep us in high spirits, lest we suffer a mutiny in the coming days.
and so I will eat this small block of fancy cheese, for morale. I will take a break and drink some tea, for morale. I will pick up that weird bug, for morale.
I'm not sure if it helps, but it does entertain me
Hi artists if you’re reading this I need you to know that it’s EXTREMELY necessary to have a folder on your phone called “bragging” where you save the screenshots of your favorite comments and sweet messages and shares and artist follow backs. So when you feel like your art sucks and you’ve only ever received praise out of pity, you can look back and realize that that feeling is wrong. The best way to combat imposter syndrome is to record your accomplishments. Keep reminders of your hard work and its reward. Actively try to be self-obsessed. Ok that’s all, go eat some fruit while you’re at it!
oh yeah this applies to writers too
The [Mosaic Mania] throw complete
If you don't crochet, you can tell how beautiful this is. But, I want to explain how you construct a mosaic project:
Depending on the technique, you're either working two rows of the same color, then switching colors and working back over the rows you just made to get the raised areas.
You might also work a single row of the background color, then switch to the foreground color (which you know from using a chart that has these things marked), and you build the design by working background and foreground over and over.
This means that any mosaic project takes about twice the amount of effort as you might expect because everything has to be doubled to get the proper look.
And to switch up patterns like this? Holy shit.
WOW!!!!!
BRIDGERTON — 1x05: “The Duke and I” (2020) QUEEN CHARLOTTE: A BRIDGERTON STORY — 1x01: “Queen to Be” (2023)
OH MY FUCKING GOD THAT'S HUGE!!
HOLY SHIT, I DIDN'T THINK WE'D EVER SEE A RESOLUTION TO THAT
Yaay good for the mail people
““The thing is that mediocre white men love Donald Trump. They love Donald Trump because Donald Trump for them has always symbolized the type of man that they have wanted to be because they fall for the lies and the facade and the smoke and mirrors: the gold toilets, the blonde women on his arm, the money to spend, the ‘I can do whatever I want attitude.’ “When you take that kind of persona, even though now we know all it is is smoke and mirrors, Ron DeSantis is the mediocre white guy. Like there isn’t anything that these schlubs are looking to aspire to when they look at Ron DeSantis, he’s not the cool kid.””
You love to see it. (Not the destruction of trees, obvs, but shitheads meeting their oncoming comeuppance at the hands of trees.)
Okay, as someone with their doctorate in plant health (specifically trees and landscape plants), I'm frothing at the mouth livid.
Pollarding is a type of pruning done where you remove the upper branches of a tree with the intent of forcing it to grow more branches. Historically, it was used to produce fodder for livestock and wood for fencing, crafting, etc. but now is more of an aesthetic choice - it creates dense shade and reduces the risk of heavy branches becoming safety concerns later.
However, that pruning is something that occurs in January - March, when the tree is dormant. Not in the peak of summer, when there's a heat wave expected. By doing it during dormancy, the tree has already stored all of the nutrients and sugars the leaves held in the roots and trunk, ready for use in spring.
By pruning these trees now, they've severely damaged them, if not outright sentenced them to death. Leaves provide a tremendous amount of shade to the trunk, actively cool the area through respiration (pulling water through the tree and into the air around it), and provide sugars and nutrients necessary for growth through photosynthesis. These trees now have to work overtime to compensate and re-grow and entire canopy of leaves with reduced resources.
These trees are in what are sometimes affectionately known as "hell strips" - there's a concrete sidewalk on one side, asphalt on the other, and they get hot. Not just upwardly hot, but they heat the soil underneath them as well. The root zone of these trees don't get a lot of water to begin with (concrete and asphalt don't let water in well) and it doesn't seem like there's a lot of soil around the tree to begin with.
Trees in hell strips already have the heat and restricted root zones working against them - you can't have healthy trees if you don't have room for roots. Now these have to compensate and draw resources to push out new growth.
In addition, all of those pruning cuts are open wounds - places where infections and insects can enter into the tree. Usually mature trees can manage minor infections or infestations with no issue. But these trees are now extra susceptible because their immune response is weakened - all the extra energy available is going to new growth, not fighting off infections.
So there's a bunch of factors here that have put these trees at a disadvantage: the removal of most photosynthetic plant material, an increase in surrounding temperature, a restricted root zone, the potential for increased infection, and a heat wave expected in the next week. These trees are going to struggle the rest of their lives because of the decision to prune these trees like this now - all over a desire to break a strike so the studios don't have to pay their actors and writers and editors fairly.
I hope they get the book thrown at them with tree law. And then some.
CGI animators should unionize next. normally, their jobs would be too precarious to strike, since studios would replace them without a second thought, but if it's part of this larger general film strike, they might finally have meaningful power to better their working conditions
if CGI animators unionized, it would kill the MCU. straight up. the the entire business model is built on exploiting CGI animators
THEY ARE TRYING!!!!! SIGN THE PETITION TO GET THE DISNEY ANIMATORS' UNION RECOGNIZED
this petition is from IATSE (union), btw! it actually has credibility, unlike most change.org/etc petitions! please sign it!!
And Sparta was not militarily excellent. Its military was profoundly mediocre, depressingly average. Even in battle, the one thing they were supposed to be good at, Sparta lost as much as it won. Judging Sparta as we should – by how well it achieved strategic objects – Sparta’s armies are a comprehensive failure. The Spartan was no super-soldier and Spartan training was not excellent. Indeed, far from making him a super-soldier, the agoge made the Spartans inflexible, arrogant and uncreative, and those flaws led directly to Sparta’s decline in power.
And I want to stress this one last time, because I know there are so many people who would pardon all of Sparta’s ills if it meant that it created superlative soldiers: it did not. Spartan soldiers were average. The horror of the Spartan system, the nastiness of the agoge, the oppression of the helots, the regimentation of daily life, it was all for nothing. Worse yet, it created a Spartan leadership class that seemed incapable of thinking its way around even basic problems. All of that supposedly cool stuff made Sparta weaker, not stronger.
This would be bad enough, but the case for Sparta is worse because it – as a point of pride – provided nothing else. No innovation in law or government came from Sparta (I hope I have shown, if nothing else, that the Spartan social system is unworthy of emulation). After 550, Sparta produced no trade goods or material culture of note. It produced no great art to raise up the human condition, no great literature to inspire. Despite possessing fairly decent farmland, it was economically underdeveloped, underpopulated and unimportant.
Athens produced great literature and innovative political thinking. Corinth was economically essential – a crucial port in the heart of Greece. Thebes gave us Pindar and was in the early fourth century a hotbed of military innovation. All three cities were adorned by magnificent architecture and supplied great art by great artists. But Sparta, Sparta gives us almost nothing.
Sparta was – if you will permit the comparison – an ancient North Korea. An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience. Little more than an extraordinarily effective prison, metastasized to the level of a state. There is nothing of redeeming value here.
Sparta is not something to be emulated. It is a cautionary tale.
at their communal tables, spartans ate nutritious but bland food, sometimes described as soup or gruel. asimov relates there was a contemporary greek joke, of course spartans don’t fear death, if all you have to look forward to is gruel every day, death seems preferable.
i posted similar thoughts on livejournal back in the day, i watched 300 and laughed out loud in the theater.
I think it’s only fair that two thousand years of idolising the Spartans is followed by two thousand years of roasting them to heck.
This.
If I can recommend you do 1 low-effort thing for the love of God it is this:
Keep 5 cards in your pocket. One will say "yes", the second will say "no."
If you lose your voice, or lose speech, or want to make a dramatic embellishment at the right time, it is an elegant and efficient solution that is right there at hand.
But what if people question you from there? "Why do you have that card? Why would you do this? How long have you had that in your pocket?" For this, or whatever else they say, the third card: "I don't have a card for that."
"What the fuck," they ask. They laugh. They are bemused. You bring the energy back down with the fourth card: "I have laryngitis. I've lost speech. My throat hurts". Whatever you expect to occur.
The joke is over. Rule of threes. Now they are curious. YThey wonder about logistics. "How did you know I would say that? Is everyone so predictable?"
As a three-part bit, nobody ever sees the fifth card coming.
"I have powerful wizard magics."
Gets them every time
"You're adorable when you're scared."
"And you are so fucking creepy. I'm really going to need you to back it up about 20 feet."
UPS drivers making more money will help all workers make more money.
Labor united helps all labor. Rising wages is not zero sum.
Don't fall for 'divide and conquer' rhetoric from the Establishment. They fear the power and influence of worker solidarity.
Not only that but a Class A CDL can take thousands of dollars to get, and road experience comes as HARD LESSONS.
And it is freekin HARD to get on at UPS. I’ve been on the road as a driver for 2 years and I got ghosted by them. Plus they work in all (hot, storming, freezing) weather and all traffic conditions. GIVE THEM THE FREEKING $42 AN HOUR.
I had a company offer me $16 an hour for Class A CDL work. They would not have had the AUDACITY to lowball me like that if the going rate in the industry was where it should be. I’m making more than that frying chicken.
Wanna know why some store shelves are empty and there are still supply chain problems? Truckers don’t want to put up with your stupid ass in traffic to bring your “stuff” to the stores for $16 an hour.
