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Jennawynn

@jennawynn / jennawynn.tumblr.com

Jennifer, she/her, white bi aro ace woman. Jennawynn on Twitter, Patreon, Twitch, and everywhere else. #TTRPG #DnD (Art blog at jennawynnarts)
London-based student Lewis Hornby is a grandson on a mission. When he noticed that his dementia-afflicted grandmother was having trouble staying hydrated, he came up with Jelly Drops—bite-sized pods of edible water that look just like tasty treats.
Each of these colorful “candies” is made up of mostly water, with gelling agents and electrolytes making up just 10% of their composition. Available in a rainbow of colors and presented in packaging reminiscent of a box of chocolates, Jelly Drops are an easy and engaging way to avoid dehydration—a common problem for those suffering from degenerative neurological diseases.
“It is very easy for people with dementia to become dehydrated,” he explains. “Many no longer feel thirst, don’t know how to quench thirst, or don’t have the dexterity to drink.” With this in mind, Hornby set out to find a solution. In addition to seeking advice from psychologists and doctors, he opted to “experience” life with dementia himself through the use of virtual reality tools and a week in a care home.
Once he was familiar with what dementia patients need, he brainstormed what they want. “From my observations, people with dementia find eating much easier than drinking. Even still, it can be difficult to engage and encourage them to eat. I found the best way to overcome this is to offer them a treat! This format excites people with dementia, they instantly recognize it and know how to interact with it.”
Case in point? Hornby’s own grandmother’s reaction: “When first offered, grandma ate seven Jelly Drops in 10 minutes, the equivalent to a cup full of water—something that would usually take hours and require much more assistance.”

What a fantastic helper.

First of all, this is an amazing invention. 

Second of all, I’d like to remind everyone that Jell-o counts as a fluid

That is, many doctors prescript Jell-o, and Gelatin treats to children and adults who, for whatever reason, have trouble keeping hydrated. Maybe they have jaw issues. Maybe dementia, or they are on a fluid-only diet and drinking broth for weeks is mind-boggling boring. 

Jell-o brand in particular has a lot of sugar added to the packets, however it’s quite straightforward to buy plain gelatin and make low-sugar jelly blobs to snack on for that sweet fruit-pop of hydration.

Soo~ Here we goooo~ 

2 cups juice – Orange juice, grape juice, whatever you want. Fuck, you could even use your favorite blend of tea, or coffee (though coffee, in my experience, needs a little more gelatin to set properly)

Low heat until juice is hot, but before it starts to boil – once you see a bit of bubbles rising, add 2 tablespoons gelatin, and stir gelatin into hot juice until totally dissolved.

Turn off heat

Add another cup and a half of juice (or whatever), stir for another minute or so, then pour into a mold.

You could pour it into ice cube trays, a Tupperware container, or any sort of silicone candy mold.

Cover it, stick in the fridge overnight, and viola~

Bite-sized taste snacks, full of water.

Gelatin is broken down very easily and put to use once in your gut, so it’s fine to eat loads of it, and otherwise you’re just taking mouthfuls of juice… or tea or whatever.

If you want it a bit more sweet, feel free to add sugar or honey to your hot juice… or hot…whatever…

I was pondering about the guy’s electrolytes worked and now I’m paralyzed with the idea of turning Gatorade into jell-o.

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Don’t use pineapple juice for this!!! The enzymes break down the gelatin and you’ll be left with soup.

Right on, forgot about that! Kiwi, Pineapple, Figs, Ginger, Guava, and Papaya have an enzyme that flips the bird to gelatin. 

Apple, Grape, Strawberries, Orange, Cherries, Blueberries, Blackberries, Lemons, Peaches, Raspberries, and Cranberries all make great gelatin snacks, though. 

i firmly believe that information like this needs to be shared, especially in any situation where the future is brought into question. as someone who’s grandfather had advanced dementia, i know first hand how difficult and devastating this can be.

seeing inventions like this come into existence is uplifting!

~ mod abalone ~

reblogging for both this amazing inventor’s story, and for the DIY alternative that anyone who struggles with hydration needs can utilize.

Interesting to call this “confiscating” when it’s just making the rich pay their fair share, especially considering all the stolen wealth from the bottom 99% and historic tax evasion.

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Besides the obvious, the hidden benefit of this is that it provides an endpoint to runaway growth.

The biggest problem with capitalism, the reason it's so destructive to the planet and to the workers and even, ultimately, to the capitalists, is that, after a certain point, the money's just a way of keeping score. The number at the bottom of the column has no bearing on what you can buy or do; as a result, there's no such thing as enough. The number can always be bigger.

Under this proposal, once you hit $1 billion, you've won capitalism. You beat the game, achieved the maximum score; you're finished. There's nothing more you can accumulate. You now have to find a purpose in life other that the relentless pursuit of profit. (And if we're really lucky, it might be something that actually benefits other people, but even if not, it's unlikely to be as damaging as whatever it is you were doing to get that $1 billion.)

Instead of companies expanding endlessly, like tumors, there's a point where, when all the major stakeholders are maxing out on profit, it makes sense to just hold steady. Keep doing/making/selling whatever it is you do/sell/make, but stop trying to do/sell/make more of it every year.

The problem with a tumor--what makes it cancer--is that it keeps growing and growing, until eventually it's taking up so much space and consuming so many resources that the surrounding tissues can't function. The tumor doesn't have to do anything better than the other tissues in order to crowd them out; it just does it faster. Stop the uncontrolled growth, and it's something you can live with.

Stopping the uncontrolled growth of capital means more opportunities for multiple businesses--big and small--operating in the same sector, since it doesn't make sense for any one company to gobble up too much of the market share. That, in turn, means more choices for customers--and workers, since they can take their skills to another employer doing similar things. It means less waste, as there's no longer an economic upside to spewing cheap goods out of a fire-hose before you even know whether anyone wants to buy them. That could mean slower, more thoughtful use of resources in the first place, but at minimum, it's going to mean not manufacturing products only to immediately throw them away.

stop saying youre investing in posts. i dont make my jokes for any kind of economy. banker-like behaviour of you

nurturing this post while it's young

supporting and cherishing this post in its infancy.

fairy godmothering this post to retain the sense of implied mischief and uncontrolled wildfire menace of “investing,” while also prompting the post to personal growth and giving it the tools to do so

Getting jealous of this post's future and cursing it to sleep in a tower for 100 years

Thwarting the curse by teaching this post proper health & safety guidelines for textile production

… so that it can make a long thread

🥂

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Color has been disappearing from the world.

A new research group used machine learning to track color changes in common materials and items, below is their findings for all color changes over time, they used 7000+ items from the 1800s to now to determine color changes in the most common items.

Below are the colors of cars by year, notice how the majority of cars are grey, white, or black compared to twenty years ago.

These aren't data points, but they are comparisons between the 'modern' homes of the 70s and 80s compared to the modern homes of today.

Carpets have equally had the same treatment of grey added to them! The most common color of carpet is now grey or beige.

Even locations that used to scream with color for decades have now modernized to becoming boring minimalist (and I love minimalism) personality-less locations.

The world is becoming colorless, why?

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you can look at any folk culture around the world, past or present, and find the use of the entire color spectrum. humans are drawn to color, it holds emotional symbolism but it also reflects the land we live off of. I consider it like a celebration of life and our place in it

the problem is that we aren’t actually allowed to belong to the places we live. houses and entire towns are shells meant to be as plain as possible for the next renter, buyer, or investor. the more generic it is, the more consumers it can be sold to. And when you have a country that’s biggest population doesn’t have a distinct sense of cultural identity it will be reflected and mass produced without much complaint

people getting joy from the minimalist gray aesthetic is not the same as the estrangement this country is making between people and place, one of the most fundamental relationships humans need to survive (and be happy while doing it)

Films depict middle ages as devoid of color but it's the other way around.

When I was buying my house, people were telling me not to paint it this or that color because it would be harder to sell later. Like, I haven't even bough the house and you're already telling me to sell it! I'm buying a house because I need a place to live! I want to live here until I die or manage to move to Europe! We are not supposed to actually own anything anymore. Not our houses or cars or furniture. We are supposed to be perpetually replacing these things, paying more each time around, until we break and die and our bones are the color of the walls around us.

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The worst part of painting houses based on trying to sell them at an unspecified point later in time is that you can just fucking… repaint it later. You can do anything you want to your house while you're living in it and anything short of structural changes can easily be changed when you want to sell it. It's absolutely absurd that the current cultural norm is to live in a boring, minimally decorated house just to keep resell value up even when you aren't selling it.

okay but this is a power move above any other

It gets even better, because he was doing all of this on a pitch black night. This dude swam towards a lure, slapped at it with his glove, and when it got caught; he let himself float and tugged on the line so the fisherman thought he had hooked a 100+ pound salmon. Once he was finally up to the shore, he turned a flashlight on in the guy’s face and walked out of the water, saying “good morning, gentlemen. State fish and game warden, you’re under arrest.“

At this point, the guy who had reeled him in had literally fallen over in shock, and the other people with him were scared shitless. The warden whipped some citations out of a plastic bag in his wetsuit, made the trespassers sign them, asked if they had any questions, and then gathered all of their fishing gear. And he just. Walked back into the river. And quietly swam away, without another word.

This man is a legend.

warden coming out of his river to shame fishermankind

so the megalodon is most definitely extinct? how do scientists know?

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well, the thing about large predators is that they leave an impact on an ecosystem big enough that you can tell they’re there, even if you never observe one directly. in this case, we know they’re definitely extinct because of the behavior of whales! whales used to max out at about 50 ft long and were fast and agile, entirely because of predation by megalodon!

but about 2 million years ago, our whales began to rapidly increase in size until we ended up with real monsters like the blue whale. this pretty directly lines up with the extinction of megalodon, and the removal of the pressure they were putting on large whale populations.

basically, large whales can get away with being gigantic, slow tanks in the oceans today because there simply isn’t a predator big enough to take them on anymore. if megalodon still existed, we would be seeing its impact on whale populations! whales would be smaller, and a hell of a lot more skittish than they are.

everything in a given ecosystem is connected, and you can often get important information about the unknown parts by observing the behavior of other parts of the ecosystem.

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All this, and the fact that if the ocean had sharks as big as Megalodon and had enough of them to sustain the species at all, we would have found at least one Megalodon tooth washed up on a beach somewhere that wasn’t fossilized. More likely, we would have found hundreds of such teeth every year for as long as we have existed. “We didn’t know giant squid existed!” is a common argument I see from cryptozoologists, but it’s also flat out false. We did know. We knew there were giant squid for centuries because we found remains of them for centuries. We simply hadn’t captured or filmed a live one!

Okay, so I am well aware that this isn’t at all how evolution or natural selection works, but I still want a horror film that begins with a pair of scientists with dramatic music playing in the background as they pour over piles of records, until one of them turns to the other and says “it’s the whales. They’re becoming smaller, and more skittish.”

The other scientist looks out the window, over the sea. “Mother of god,” she whispers.

Alternatively;

We begin to find giant shark teeth washing up on shore. People freak out. “Scientists find evidence megalodons never went extinct!”

Then the lead scientist calms everyone down so they can explain. “No. It’s worse than that. If they never went extinct, we would’ve found evidence like this before now. This means… ” Dramatically takes off glasses. 

“They’ve just come back.”

“But they can’t just suddenly come back like that!”

“You’re right. Someone brought them back.”

PLEASE,,,

Jesus Christ Super-predator

I’m pretty sure that I was the one driving when we all got into this little circus car but now I’m wedged under the back seat and the clowns have just ramped us off the grandstands and directly onto the popcorn cart

my jaw? on the floor. my mind? blown. my love for aabria iyengar? THROUGH THE ROOF!!! what a moment!!!!

detail shots in the reblogs <3

I try to stay away from a lot of fandom discourse, but since I’ve been seeing this on my dash again and in tags, I feel the need to make a statement on this, particularly for any young fans who follow me that might get drawn into this mindset.

Stay away from purity culture. Warn your friends away from it too, if you see them starting to fall for it. It’s very easy to get drawn into it

Almost always, it starts with one of three roots, pedophilia, incest and/or abuse. Usually it’s pedophilia. Funnily enough, that’s also what congress usually uses to try to justify passing bills that undermine online privacy & security. Because it’s an easy, extreme target, and when people attempt to argue against it, it’s nice and easy to say “Oh so you like pedophilia” rather then actually engaging with their argument.

The logic goes like this, although there’s many forms of it.

  1. “Pedophilia is bad.” -> Obviously, you agree with this. You’re a reasonable person, and the idea that anyone would do something like that to a child is horrible. This is a normal human reaction.
  2. “Because pedophilia is bad, all fictional explorations of it must be equally bad.” -> Here you might hesitate, but it adds up, doesn’t it? The thought of pedophilia in any context probably gives you a bad feeling, that makes you inclined to go along with this logic. 
  3. “Anyone who creates content with a fictional exploration of pedophilia is also bad.” -> Maybe you pause here, or maybe you don’t. But still, it adds up, it’s a very easy flow. After all, we’ve decided that that is Bad, so why would anyone Good want to create something like that?
  4. “Since people who create content with a fictional exploration of pedophilia are just as bad as people who engage in pedophilia in real life, it’s okay to harm them.” -> Here’s where you might pause again. The argument might not win you over entirely, you might not be willing to do harm yourself, but you may be a lot more willing to turn a blind eye to harm being done to someone. Or to consider it ‘justified’.
  5. The pattern now repeats for anything else that’s considered “morally impure”, and “pedophilia” is expanded and expanded, often to ridiculous points, such as merely shipping two underage characters. “Abuse” becomes any ship that the person pushing doesn’t like, for any reason. And so on and so forth.

This is the foundation of “anti” culture, and it’s important to be aware of it so you can catch this false equivocation. Fictional explorations of something, are not the same as the thing itself. Fictional explorations are fiction. The characters are not real people. There is no actual harm being done. Equating fake harm and real harm is a dangerous, slippery slope, which leads us to fundamentally flawed ideas of moral purity. It’s a form of controlling people & making them feel guilty for their very thoughts, rather than holding people accountable for their actions. 

A very handy trick for when you encounter this sort of argument, is to replace whatever the selected purity term is with murder. After all, we can all agree that murder is bad, but at the same time, we understand that a murder in a book =/= a murder in real life.

Let’s see that argument again, shall we?

  1. “Murder is bad”
  2. “Because murder is bad, all fictional explorations of it must be equally bad.”
  3. “Anyone who creates content with a fictional exploration of murder is also bad.”
  4. “Since people who create fictional explorations of murder are just as bad as the people who commit murder in real life, it’s okay to harm them.”

Hopefully, it’s now easy to see why the above argument is fundamentally flawed.

Keep your eye out for purity culture in your fandom spaces, and when you see it, refuse to engage with it. Warn your friends if you see them falling into the same traps, although try to be kind about it; this is a very easy thought pattern to fall into. I don’t recommend trying to argue/debate anti’s. The attention only feeds them. Block them instead. Don’t let people control or shame you for what you create or consume, and don’t control or shame others for what they create or consume.

Also, as a note, let me be clear about something. If you are uncomfortable with any of the above discussed things, or anything in general in fiction (ie, underage ships, murder, incest, abuse, penguins, needles, etc), that’s perfectly fine (it’s also called a squick, for those that haven’t heard that term before). Absolutely control your fandom experience by blocking people, filtering tags, unfollowing, etc. However, just because you are uncomfortable with something, does not give you the right to control other people. Other people have no right to control what content you create or consume, and you have no right to do that to them either. 

Okay?

“It’s a form of controlling people & making them feel guilty for their very thoughts, rather than holding people accountable for their actions. ”

“Fictional explorations of something, are not the same as the thing itself. Fictional explorations are fiction. The characters are not real people. There is no actual harm being done. Equating fake harm and real harm is a dangerous, slippery slope, which leads us to fundamentally flawed ideas of moral purity.”

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Fictional characters are not real people.

If I kill off a character, I am not a murderer.

Also, creators are not obligated to explore so-called ‘problematic content’ in only certain ways. Creators are allowed to create things simply for the enjoyment of it and do not need to justify their reasons for it or use said creations as a proclamation of their real life views and morals, because those things are not synonymous.

Living alone leads to habits that you don’t realize are weird until you stay with someone else and have to suppress them.

I’m staying with family right now and I can’t just go “AUGH” like a peanuts character in the middle of the night just because I feel like it. I also can’t lick cooking utensils anymore because other people are gonna be eating that. And I can’t rant to my Swedish horse because I left that at home and also ranting to an inanimate object in the middle of the house would make me look insane.

I was talking to my aunt about this because she also lives alone and we agree that when you start living alone you need to start making more noises when you do things like grunting when you get up and yelling at annoying inanimate objects because you need to fill the space somehow. But when suddenly other people are around you’re now in the habit of whistling whenever you open a cabinet and people who have never lived alone don’t understand what you’re doing.

y'know, one thing i don't see get talked about much in regards to asexuality is how it feels to never be 'sexually motivated' by anything

and not just when it comes to advertisements using 'sexy' models to try and sell you stuff, but like. in general

sex as a favor, sex as a bribe, sex in exchange for whatever

casual sex, 'friends with benefits' situations, even simple flirting

it all looks a whole lot different from the perspective of someone who's immune to manipulation via sex appeal, who has virtually no understanding as to why sex would motivate someone to cheat on their partner, etc. etc.

sex is worthless to me

i mean, it's useful as a story element in fiction, but it genuinely perplexes me that sex is such a driving force behind so many aspects of irl society & of people's individual lives, for better or for worse

and that it's so deeply ingrained into how the average person views the world & various situations, because the average person feels sexual attraction, whereas i do not

i think the barrier between aces & allos is actually even deeper than it seems on the surface at times, because it's more than just the grating expectation that everyone must want to 'settle down' and have kids, it's also the fact that the majority of the world is sort of 'in' on a joke that aces will never truly be a part of

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Posts that validate my identity

Sex as a form of intimacy? Understand. Intimacy as enjoyable? Understand. Intimacy as vital? Understand. Sex as vital? Does not compute

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Never understanding that DRIVE is one of the main reasons I struggle with understanding motivation. I get it as a theory, as a plot point in a book or whatever, but in REAL LIFE?

What do you mean "you couldn't help yourself?" and slept with someone you know isn't good for you?

If "they didn't mean anything" then why did you sleep with them?

I get an enemies to lovers plot in a book or fic, but how could you actually overlook that in real life? You HATE this person, why did you kiss them?!

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I just went on a rant about plungers, how’s your day going?

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“go off bestie”? Okay, I will.

This is a plunger.

Classic red cup with a wooden stick. We all know it, love it, and have seen a cartoon character using it to unclog a toilet. Right?

WRONG.

The image above is actually a drain plunger, used on sinks, showers, and baths. Not on toilets.

These are a toilet plungers.

Take note of the variations. Each of them have a flange of sorts at the bottom, either connected via a cup or more accordion-like tube. These are designed to actually get down into the toilet bowl where it flushes down, giving it more space and leverage to unclog blockages. See the example below:

Notice how the flange allows it to go deeper into the toilet to provide more power to the plunge. Sink/drain plungers are far less efficient and effective at the task.

Sink plungers can also have an accordion shape to help with power in plunging, but crucially do not have or need the flange that toilet plungers do.

To recap: cup plungers are for sinks, showers, bathtubs, and other drains. Flange and accordion plungers are for toilets. Notably, accordion plungers are slightly harder to use, but are more powerful when used correctly than their flange counterparts.

So the next time you see a cartoon, video game, or stock art depicting a cup plunger being used on a toilet, you can feel the same levels of anger and emotion that I do!

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why does this have nearly 100 notes

Because with this level of passion, containment is futile 

The real question is why does this not have a million notes? This is information that will very likely, at some point, be incredibly useful to anyone who has indoor plumbing. Which is, you know, probably, 99.99% of this website's user base. (I'm sure there's someone out there using Tumblr who lives in a house built in 1850 which never got upgraded and they still have an outhouse rather than toilet.)

current note count: 4,970

Seriously, a toilet plunger will save you so much money. Get one.

that third flange plunger in the pic above? AMAZING!

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Jason Anderson

British artist Jason Anderson creates colorful abstract paintings composed of pixelated swatches of pastel-toned oil paint. Up-close, the artist’s paintings look like blocky layers of shapes and color; but, from afar, his scenes—featuring cityscapes, roads, trains, and marinas—are revealed.

Anderson began his career as a stained glass apprentice, where he worked on restoring the windows of cathedrals. He soon progressed onto designing the glass murals himself, where he learned how to break down subject matter into “jigsaws” of colored sections. This approach still shines through in his paintings today—complex scenes are brought to life with simple shapes and careful consideration to hue and tone.

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These really speak to me.

Why do these cubes make me feel feelings

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jane fonda got arrested the third week in a row at climate change protests. this time with ted danson

Legends only

For everyone complaining about how these two can get arrested and it won’t affect their careers, you’re right. It most likely won’t hurt their careers. That’s why they keep going out and doing it. They’re using their platform to their advantage. They’re both white, of an older generation, and famous enough to be recognized. They’re holding their generation accountable and making an effort to show up and enforce change. This isn’t them advertising a TV show or some bs, they’re there to help

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This is a very good way to use your privilege.

Jane Fonda has been involved in protest since the America Vietnam war

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Jane Fonda’s activism did, in fact, hurt her career, and she’s out there risking it all again. She wasn’t just involved in protest since the Vietnam war (tho that is what did her career the most damage, some lawmakers were actually calling for her to be tried for treason over it)

She was already under government surveillance before that for her support of the Black Panthers and her show of solidarity with two separate first nations re-occupations (Fort Lawton and Alcatraz). 

She’s not being silly or doing a bit or pulling a PR stunt. She’s just not letting the cops scare her. Because this is far from her first rodeo.

Jane Fonda’s mugshot from Nov. 3, 1970.

She was arrested on trumped-up drug smuggling charges, which an officer later admitted was their only way of booking her because god damn Nixon wanted her arrested for her anti-Vietnam War activism. The FBI and the CIA, and the NSA had been surveilling her for months without her knowledge.

If there is any celebrity whose activism is not empty lip service, it’s Jane fucking Fonda.

"So YoU'rE sAyInG mEn HaTe OtHeR mEn?"

Yes. Yes I am. And you can ask literally any marginalized man and they will tell you American Patriarchy hates them, too, specifically because they are being men in the "wrong way".

Like fuck, this is feminism 101.

Edit: it's non-radfem feminism 101.

Just look at the way that manosphere wierdos talk in reference to other men: they are competitors to be dominated either socially or with explicit violence. The whole grift is built on selling men the idea that they can climb their way to the top of the pile

^^^ This. It's like a pyramid scheme of abuse. "If you throw fifteen men under the bus and convince five of your friends to throw fifteen other men under the bus, you can Win at Patriarchy, we promise!"

I can't agree enough with this, and it's something more and more men are speaking up about, even if our voices aren't being heard.

Man box culture, as some call it, starts when we're young. It's pervasive - the competition to be a real "man" as defined by violence, dominance, and this absolutely fucked up concept of emotional detachment. It's a raw struggle to not appear weak, and it starts with how adult men treat male children - the toxic values they instill, sometimes with words and sometimes with fists. And even if you grow up in a less toxic and more loving environment, you're never really free from it. Your male role models, male adults like teachers and such, but especially male friends who are your age, all get caught up in this toxic system of abuse. And "real men" don't have emotions, right? So you have to bottle all that up rather than understanding any of it because it's *weakness.* All of that tends to come out in the one emotional state that men allow each other to display: anger. Shit, by the time most boys reach high school, they've been struggling against each other for years. All that hate, that anger, that uncontrollable rage? That's been taught to them long before teenage testosterone hits. And by that time, it's gotten worse because the patriarchy has defined how "real men" see and treat women. Underneath everything is this deep, deep fear of failing and becoming the weak punching bag. There's so much shame to it all.

It isn't always like this for every boy growing up, but no one is left unaware of its existence. And the only true way to stop it begins when we are young.

This is fucking heartbreaking.

One of my friends in law school once opened up to me and a few other people in our mixed-gender friend group that he didn't really have friends before he knew us, even though he thought he did. We sort of nodded like, yeah man, we're glad you're our friend too, sorry people back in your home town were shitty – and he stopped us like, no, you don't understand. He told us that he thought he had friends, and that those people thought that they were his friends – but that his all-male small-town social circle constantly hurled abuse at each other, and that they all thought that that was normal. He told us that he used to go out partying with them, and whereas when we'd go out, we'd talk each other up – like, man, nice shirt, love what you did with your hair, I bet chicks are gonna dig it, etc. – back in his old circle of friends? All they'd ever do before going out was talk each other down. You're dressed worse than your friends? You look like trash. You're dressed better than your friends? Why do you care so much about you're appearance, are you gay? You're dressed exactly the same as your friends? Wow, look at this loser copying other people's look. You could never win, you could never even break even, and you were expected to not only put up with this, but to participate, because that sort of normalized constant stream of verbal abuse was the main way that you and other men your age socialized. He literally did not realize that men could have actual, real friendships – with women, sure, but also with other men – until he met us, because to him, the act of hanging out with people who you weren't dating was so deeply intertwined with toxic competitive expectations that he flat out didn't know that there was a different way to be until he moved halfway across the country for law school in his late 20s.

It's incredibly fucked up, and men should be able to talk about what a patriarchal culture like that does to them without being silenced.

The union busting firms are scared

As a fine dining cook, I found work in a union workplace around a year ago. My 40 hours a week are guaranteed except for Jan/feb/mar when there’s not enough customers, I get paid almost twice what I did at any other restaurant, if I work overtime, (more than 8 hours in one day, or more than 40 in a week), I actually get overtime pay, (and it’s 1.5x my normal rate!). I get holiday pay, and in addition I get to either bank or pay out my holidays if I work those days, (either a paid day off when I want it, in addition to the holiday pay, or I get paid an add’l 8 hours at 1.5x that week). I also get two floating holidays, 4 paid random sick days, 2 paid family sick days, and 4 paid “doctor’s note” sick days, (paid out by our health insurance), as well as general allowance to take as many unpaid sick days as I want without worrying for my job security. (I’ve been told that taking multiple months off is where we start to be concerned about abuse, so if I want to do that, I can go through our leave of absence procedures instead, where I’m allowed three 2-week periods a year generally for whatever reason I want, (If my manager wants to disagree, he has to get the union president’s approval), and after that it’s up to my manager to decide if he’ll accept them). I get two weeks of paid vacation time a year, and an add’l week per year for every 5 years I work there. We get our legally mandated breaks, which, I know that sounds like a low bar, but taking anything other than a smoke break in a kitchen?!?! Unheard of! I get two 15′s and a lunch every shift! I get to sitdown and rest my legs and not get flak for it! I get a bonus at the end of the year, there’s official procedures for if my manager isn’t happy with me or wants to get rid of me, (three meetings, during which my union representative has to be present), (and getting rid of my classification doesn’t work, there’s rules for how someone ‘bumps’ other people if classifications are gotten rid of), and severance pay for when full-time employees that are downsized out of the company, there’s a pension plan, like . . . Guys, I have a 40-page handbook which details all of the rights my union has won me, and believe me, I’ve never had any of these at any prior workplace. And you know what my union dues are? $4 a paycheck. Of course I’m going to pay my union dues for all of those benefits.

Reblogging for this incredibly thorough explanation of what it's like to actually have a contract in place at a union workplace. I reblog a fair number of posts about how people should organize, but if you're like me, you might not know exactly what that can get you until you've actually gone through the process. Every contract is different because you bargain for what makes sense for your particular workplace, and every few years you re-negotiate with the employer to improve things in the next contract, but some things (like the right to have union representation when you talk to your boss about leave or discipline) are universal.

It's worth every penny of your dues, I promise.

another underappreciated tumblr feature that you dont get on other sites is the queue. i love it when something i thought was funny six months ago and then forgot about a week later crawlts its way out of the processing vortex and i get to see it all over again.

you should queue this post it would be funny and grant me immortality

you motherfuckers put me in the processing vortex