You know, it occurs to me that the known internet phenomenon of Reddit “am I the asshole?” posts having completely misleading headers is actually a really great example of a far less known but far more common practice of extreme journalistic spin in cases where there are large monetary incentives to diminish the story in question.
Like, if you see a Reddit post titled “Am I the asshole for buying my wife a new dress?”, the post is pretty much always something totally deranged like: “I (48) really dislike the way my wife (20) dresses, because I think it’s too revealing and makes her look slutty, which was fine when we started dating five years ago, but it makes me feel like she’s going to cheat on me now that we’re married. I’ve politely asked her to get new clothes multiple times, and every time she refused because she said she liked her clothes, and didn’t want to waste money buying new ones. Yesterday I couldn’t take it anymore so I threw out a bunch of her old dresses and bought her a new one that was more modest looking. She started crying because one of the dresses I threw out had been left to her by her mom who died when she was a teen, but I couldn’t have known that it had sentimental value. She said that I should have asked, but obviously if I asked she’d have just told me not to throw out any of her clothes, including the ones that weren’t sentimental. Also, the more modest dress I bought was pretty expensive, and she never thanked me for it. Am I the asshole here, or is she being unreasonable?”
Similarly, whenever you see a headline like “Woman Wins Millions From McDonald’s Because Her Hot Coffee Was Too Hot”, if you dig a bit, you’ll almost always quickly find out that what actually happened was: A 79-year-old ordered coffee which, unbeknownst to her, was being served extremely dangerously hot, because McDonald’s was trying to have coffee that stayed warm over a long commute without spending any extra money on cups with better insulation. The coffee spilled on the old woman’s lap, giving her severe third degree burns over a huge portion of her body, including her genitals. She got to a hospital and they managed to save her life with skin grafting, but she became disabled from the accident, and her genitals and thighs were permanently disfigured. She tried to settle with McDonald’s for her medical costs, and McDonald’s refused to cover any portion of her medical expenses at all, and so she sued. At trial, the jury discovered that this same exact thing had happened seven hundred times before, and McDonald’s had still decided not to change their policy because paying out individual suits was cheaper than moderately reducing their coffee profits. As a result, the jury awarded punitive damages designed to penalize McDonald’s two days worth of their coffee profits, in addition to the woman’s medical costs.
I think it’s largely the same phenomenon, but I know a lot of people who are familiar with the first case, but don’t know to look for the second. If you see some totally outrageous “how could a person ever sue over this stupid thing?” case, you should immediately be incredibly suspicious that that’s all that actually happened, because a lot of the time, it absolutely isn’t. The people who have the most incentive to make their opponent look not only wrong, but completely crazy for having any sort of grievance at all, are often the actually unreasonable ones.
Anyway this is all to say that if I see ANY of y’all automatically siding with McDonald’s over the recent case where 4-year-old girl was severely burned by their chicken nuggets because “hurr durr dumb kid didn’t know that chicken nuggets were hot, people sue over anything lol”, I will grab that McBoot you’re licking and shove it all the way up your McFuckingAss.
2nd degree burns actually heal pretty quickly and that’s in adults, children have a borderline superhero-level healing factor. Also the nugget was pressed against the child’s skin for a full 2 minutes. The mother is more at fault than McDonald’s here for giving the small child the food almost immediately after getting the order that was cooked at a fairly normal temperature and collected swiftly. Of course it was gonna be hot. Hot like the handle of a cast-iron skillet, you can hold it for some time but after a bit it’s gonna hurt, and for longer you could blister.
The chicken nuggets were being served at a temperature of ~200°F, despite McDonald’s supposedly having a policy of serving food at temperatures no higher than 160°F. The girl is autistic, and the chicken nugget remained in contact with her body that long because she was unable to communicate to her mother where the chicken nugget had gotten caught as it was burning her. She has a permanent scar from the experience. The family was only asking for $15,000, which is not for anywhere near the level of profit that we know that McDonald’s has made from repeatedly choosing cost-cutting tactics over the health and safety of their consumers and employees. And by the way? Most insurance companies require the victim to sue, and won’t cover any medical costs if they don’t.
What part of all the way up your McFuckingAss did you not fucking understand?!
Ronald McDonald isn’t going to fuck you, and if you want to pathetically simp for a multi-billion dollar corporation, you should do that on your own fucking post.
Wait what? 200°??? Permanent scarring? My info put it at a second degree burn at worst, even a pretty bad one typically heals relatively well.
Second-degree burns can range from quite mild to fairly severe - they can absolutely lead to permanent scarring if they are on the severe end of the spectrum. In this case, yes, the incident in question left permanently scarring - and the girl’s mother testified that her daughter (now seven years old, as this incident was three years ago) refers to the still-quite-visible burn scar as “her chicken nugget”.
And as for not having read anything that mentioned the “served at 200°F” part of this whole case? HMM IT’S ALMOST LIKE THERE WAS SOME EXTREME JOURNALISTIC SPIN APPLIED TO MAKE THIS CASE SOUND WAY MORE FRIVOLOUS THAN IT ACTUALLY WAS.
Wild how people will do that in cases where there’s a huge monetary incentive to minimize what happened, huh? Maybe someone should make a post about it.
There is a new subreddit called r/PeriodPantry that allows people who need period products to post wishlists. Many people are forced by poverty to chose between menstrual hygiene products and other necessities, and may end up skipping meals or suffering health problems or social isolation as a result of lacking hygiene products. Please feel welcome to post a period product wishlist, fulfill a wishlist, and/or reblog this post to help it reach others.
Hey, this is a really cool mutual aid group, if you need period products or can help someone get period products this is a great little group to check out.
i am not a whole person. parts of me died in the house i grew up in
Speaking of therapy, I say, as though we're old friends, and you're not a stranger trapped in this metaphorical elevator with me and you can hear the suspension wires starting to fray.
I've been doing a lot of work recently that's focused on imposter syndrome and the feeling that no matter how well or how much I do, I'm not good enough. That I'm somehow tricking everyone into thinking my work is actually good.
Some days it's a minor niggle in my head that I can gentle and soothe with logic and affirmations. Or smother, depending on the mood. Other times it's loud and all-consuming and the mental anguish it causes me is so real I can feel it twitching in my muscles. This desperate fight-or-flight instinct with nowhere to go and nothing to fight but myself.
Anyway, because I'm several types of Mentally Unwell™, I was switching between workshop sheets ahead of next week. Filling in different forms. (Trying to get a good grade in therapy) And I got my "recognize your harmful ADHD coping mechanisms" worksheet mixed in with the "you're not actually lying to people, you just feel like you are because your brain is full of weasels" worksheet, and seeing them side by side made something go topsy turvy in my head, and I just had to sit and breathe for a couple of minutes until the urge to scream passed. Because it clicked, it all suddenly clicked.
The reason the imposter syndrome workshops and therapy sessions aren't sticking was because I do routinely trick people into thinking I'm someone I'm not.
Because I'm masking my ADHD for their convenience.
I've always known there was something wrong with me. My neurotypical peers made it abundantly clear I didn't fit in or was failing in some way I couldn't see nor remedy, no matter how hard I tried.
So I compressed myself into a workaholic box of hyper-competence in the hopes they'd stop noticing the flaws and exploit like me instead. And then subsequently lived with the daily fear that if they looked too close, they'd realize I'm a monumental fuck up with enough personal baggage to block the Suez Canal.
If you ever need someone to burn themselves to ashes for your comfort and convenience, I'm your gal.
Or I used to. Until I had a bit of a breakdown, and the rubber band holding my brain together snapped and pinged off into the stratosphere, never to be seen again.
Unfortunately, the trauma of living like that didn't also fuck off and instead left a gaping maw where my personality ought to be, so now I get to deal with that aftermath.
And it's that aftermath that's affecting the imposter syndrome shit. Because yes, I am hyper-competent and good at what I do-- but it doesn't feel real because that is how I mask.
And the truly frustrating thing is I am good at what I do. I am not pretending. I worked hard to be good at this. It just feels like I'm dicking around because 90% of my personality turns out to be trauma masquerading as humor in a trenchcoat, and having people genuinely like something weird I'm doing is so foreign my brain has decided it's just another form of masking.
I'm pretending to be a good author so people will think I'm a good author, and my brain thinks we are in Danger of being found out. We are in Danger, and writing is Dangerous because then people will know I'm Weird and not whatever palatable version I've presented myself as for their NT sensibilities.
Like the neurotic vampire with a raging praise kink wasn't an obvious giveaway.
Anyway. I got nothing else. Thanks for listening.
I'm going to go be very normal in another room and not stare into the abyss of my own soul for a bit.
I brought this post up with my ADHD therapist today (who also has ADHD), and she got so still that I thought our Zoom call had frozen.
Turns out she just needed to stare into her soul for a bit and it looked like this:
Iconic historical stage designs for The Queen of the Night sequence from Mozart’s “Magic Flute” - the first image by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 1815, the second by Simon Quaglio in 1818 (x)
when you’ve honed the fine art of perfectly-timed reblogging of something aimed at one specific mutual and they immediately like it
Tags from @krawdad because i thought this was very cool from a puppeteering perspective
[ID: Image one is a Sesame Street gif of Big Bird throwing a frisbee to Cookie Monster, who promptly takes a bite of it. Image two is a set of tags that read: “#i want to appreciate how wacky a stunt tossing a frizbee to cookie monster is from a practical standpoint #guy inside the bird cannot see out of it. he gets a feed of what the camera sees. #he actually catches the thing the bird actually threw
#and the only reason i can tell they didnt fake it is because cookie monster doesn’t look at the frizbee when he catches it #because the puppeteer was focused on catching the dang thing at all #how many takes must this have taken to pull off #usually you achieve that with a cut #it’s so much easier to just cut to the other character catching a prop #i appreciate the effort #and i want others to notice it #it is also a left handed catch #on a right handed performer #someone else is doing the right hand.” End ID]
It’s also a left-handed throw because the puppeteer’s right hand controls Big Bird’s mouth
this is a really cool puppet stunt o-o
The poll feature really took off because it taps into tumblr's favorite activity: being extremely opinionated about things that don't matter
Ok sorry to share this here I just like am scrambling to find a living situation after my roomate situation fell through
Loiosh has the most magnificent tum and I want to bury my face in it. This is a bad idea.
My winner 💚
Y'ALL BETTER GO STREAM CHA CHA CHA
Abled Person: Hey man, can you hold this wad of $2,000 and this one penny for me while I open my wallet?
Disabled Person: YOU COMPLETE AND UTTER FOOL!
The United States Government:
(Watch how many people don’t get this.)
In order for disabled people to receive any sort of financial assistant for their housing, food, bills, medical supplies, etc., they cannot ever have more than $2,000 of resources to their name. Ever.
It doesn’t matter what it’s for.
You’re saving up for a new wheelchair?
For college?
To put a downpayment on a house?
Hell man, you just happen to budget for once in your life so that you can have some extra money in case something bad happens?
Your benefits immediately get cut off if you’re a cent over $2,000.
And, even worse, you usually end up having to pay back every dollar the government gave you that month.
So say you get $400. If they find out you’re twenty dollars over the resource limit, you have to give them all $400 back and you undergo an investigation of your funds to see if you will continue getting money.
“What if I spend the money that day?”
Doesn’t matter. In fact, from what I can tell, people who do this are actually put under investigation for fraud.
And yes, this system literally kills people.
Remember when “Guardians of the Galaxy” came out? one of Rocket Racoon’s creators, Bill Mantlo, suffered an accident in 1992 and has irreparable brain damage.
before the movie came out, Marvel gave him an exclusive preview screening. SOme people were upset because they felt if Marvel was really wanted to thank mantlo, they should have donated money to Mantlo’s family.
Bill Mantlo’s brother had to come out and explain: If Marvel gave them monetary aid, Bill Mantlo would lose his financial assistance.
That’s so utterly depressing.
disgusting
I have friends on welfare who won’t pick up a penny in the street because they’d risk the welfare they struggled to get for 10 years.
oh look another fucked up thing in this world. let’s just add it to the list. number 63858b
My brother has been on California State SSI for autism for the last 10 years, and he absolutely has to (no joke, HAS TO) spend all 720 bucks of his SSI every month, because if he puts it in the bank he risks losing his SSI altogether.
Sometimes, at the end of the month, he has no idea what to do with his money because the whole month went by and he still has 400-ish bucks in his account, and he fucking panics because he doesn’t want to get anywhere near 2,000.
And here’s the funnest part of the story!
One day he did a huge commission on Second Life and wound up earning 1500 bucks off of it, and he told the guy to donate it 500 bucks at a time over 3 months. The guy didn’t want to, and just donated all 1500, which put my brother at 2,036 bucks.
The state IMMEDIATELY (I’m talking less than an hour) called him up to tell him over the phone that they were canceling his SSI, because they noticed he had gone over the 2,000 buck threshold. He had to tell them that someone had made a charitable donation to him and that this was not a common occurrence in any way shape or form, and upon not believing him, my mother had to call to talk to them as his legal caretaker and say basically the same thing until they called off the cancellation of his SSI money.
He also had to cancel his renter’s assistance because it put him to 1,062 a month, so if he went 30 days without spending any money they’d cancel his SSI altogether. Like, none of us in the family have any fucking clue why that regulation is in place and it’s the stupidest shit in human history.
Please, legal side of Tumblr, tell me what positive reasoning this law has?
Happy 4th of July everyone! This is what the “nation of opportunity” looks like.
There’s something called an ABLE account that can help. If you are on SSI and were diagnosed as disabled before the age of 26 you can apply for an ABLE account that will allow you to save up to $99,000. More people need to know about this!
thank you so much for this information. i’m applying for an abled account right now
THERES A WHAT
OH GOD BLESS THE SHIT OUTTA YOU YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW FREAKED OUT OVER THIS I WAS
I’ve been looking into SSI; I had no idea about this!
Read till the end for the important info
Reblog to literally save a disabled person’s life
This shit is why conservatives think disability is fun pampering, because they see disabled people have to come up with ways to get rid of the money and to them it looks like they must be rolling in excess.






















