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l'Heure du Thé

@l-heure-du-the / l-heure-du-the.tumblr.com

Art, Dolls, Politics. Asexual Panromantic Pronouns : they/them * Buy Me a Coffee * RedBubble * Twitch * Instagram
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libraford

Looking more closely at adult autism symptoms lists is like...

... the source of my misery, is that I should have been demanding accomodations my whole life that I didn't know I needed.

I have ADHD and only got diagnosed as an adult and my psychologist suspects I have Autism as well. It gets super frustrating that I look back on how much I struggles with work and school and that if my mother had done anything to help me I could have done much better. It leads to a lot of rage.

What's really making me lose it is that I have actually asked for accommodations before even without framing it as autism and gotten dismissed! And they're absolutely normal requests!

"I'd like some clarifications." "I thought it was self explanatory."

"Can you repeat the question, please?" "You weren't listening."

"Can we clear up some miscommunication?" "We've gone over this a dozen times."

And then one of the adult symptoms is 'unreasonable emotional responses' and it's like... fucking gee I wonder why someone might have an emotional meltdown after dealing with that constantly.

One of my requests at a previous job was 'please don't make work complicated by stalking me on the internet' and apparently THAT was too big of a request.

Like I am being better about advocating for myself, even before I started looking at this seriously. But it's an uphill battle to get people to listen to me when I do.

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Anonymous asked:

What's some advice you wish you received much earlier

"When people come to you to establish a boundary or a need or to express hurt feelings, that's a compliment, not an attack. That is them wanting to develop the relationship and trusting you to listen and care to do better. And no matter how sad you are about accidentally hurting them, it's a GOOD thing that they cared to have a hard conversation with you"

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Suzanne collins wrote a trilogy where a main media propaganda strategy was to market a horrific act of violence as a love story to distract ppl and then it got adapted into a box office breaking movie and ppl made it all about the love triangle. so then since they didn’t get the point the first time Suzanne collins wrote a prequel story about the main dictator and she makes it so that you as a reader want it to be a genuine love story so badly even tho it’s so very clearly not and instead feels extremely unsettling to make her point even more meta which then gets adapted into another box office breaking film and now ppl are making romantic snowbaird tik toks. do u think she’s gonna write another book that’s somehow even more blatant or just give up and start executing ppl? hard to say but I wouldn’t blame her for the second one

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maniculum

One of the things I’ve noticed working in a bookstore is that a surprising number of people are completely unfamiliar with the normal way books are organized.

(I mean, in the part of the store where we keep the used books, I frequently have to assure people that the books are organized at all, but that’s because we have way more books than we have shelf space and there’s no way to handle that without it looking a bit of a mess.)

On one hand, we get customers who are apparently a completely blank slate in this area. I frequently have to walk people through, like, “Okay, it’s organized by subject / genre, then by author. Oh, ‘by author’ means in alphabetical order by the name of the author. No, their last name.” (Most of the people I give this talk to are, I think, college kids — it’s a bit strange to me that you can reach that age without knowing how bookstores work, but then again, I can kind of see how these days it’s possible to mostly get your books online where you just use a search function.)

One customer responded to the above explanation with “oh, it’s the Dewey Decimal System!” and I had to be like… no. Similar in broad concept, yes, but the Dewey Decimal System is a very specific thing (involving… decimals) and it’s really only used in libraries, not bookstores, because it kind of requires you to label the spines of your books, which bookstores generally don’t like to do for obvious reasons.

On the other hand, we also get customers with pre-existing incorrect assumptions, which are so often similar that I think they’re being imported from other media (though I’m not sure what).

People seem to expect the organization of Fiction to be much more granular — e.g., “where’s historical fiction?” “oh, that’s just in with general fiction.” I think some of that comes from movies (people ask where the “rom-com” section is, and that’s definitely a movie thing), but I’m not sure that’s always the reason.

(Admittedly the fiction organization is a bit more granular in the Used Books area than it is in the New Books, but that’s because there are certain genres that we get tons of from people selling us their old books, but we don’t buy enough of on purpose to justify giving them their own section in New Books.)

At the same time, people have the opposite assumption about Non-Fiction — i.e., they expect there to be one singular section labeled “Non-Fiction”, which is not the case. I’ve had multiple conversations that go like:

Customer: Where can I find non-fiction books?
Me: You’ll have to be more specific.
Customer: You know, non-fiction.
Me: [gesturing at the signs hanging from the ceiling that say things like “science”, “philosophy”, “art”, “history”, etc.] All of these are non-fiction in their own special way.

I try to be nice about it, but I don’t think I always succeed, just because I’m so often legitimately surprised and confused when someone just doesn’t know How Do You Books. I’m getting used to it now, but I’ve been working there for almost five years, so there’s been quite a long adjustment period in between.

Anyway. Just some observations.

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pomrania

Interesting, because in my experience, used bookstores have always had their fiction organized by genre; but that might just be selection bias, since the only genre section I care to locate is the fantasy/sci-fi section, which... presumably that's much easier to sort out, just from a cursory look at the cover, than other genres of fiction. (I've been to places that sort out "fantasy" and "sci-fi" separately, but it's not common; because, listen, I sort my own personal bookshelves by sub-genre, these are books I've read and I liked them enough to keep, and I still have to have a section for "things that are kind of in-between fantasy and sci-fi".)

It is organized by genre, but the only fiction sections in the New Books area are:

  • General Fiction
  • Sci-Fi & Fantasy
  • Mystery & Thriller
  • Kids & YA
  • Humor & Comics
  • and a space for pre-modern literature with subcategories for Classical vs. Medieval, which regularly causes confusion because some of the people who ask about a “Classics” section basically mean “stuff my teachers assigned me” and are dumbfounded when I lead them to a shelf of Greek & Roman stuff.

Which are, you know, broad categories, but it’s about as granular as I generally expect from a bookstore of this size and generally accords with my experience of other stores I have patronized in the past. I can see an argument for there being more categories (though not, e.g., “rom-com”), but it would require a lot of reorganization effort and basically make people less likely to find specific genres like “historical fiction” by isolating them in small, easy-to-overlook sections. One of the ways in which physical and digital organization present different challenges.

Down in the used books we also have:

  • Romance
  • Westerns
  • Christian Fiction
  • Horror
  • and a hilariously large section specifically for “Vampires & other Paranormal Romance”. (funnily enough, this does not include Twilight, which goes in YA.)

In all cases, we do have new books in those genres too, just not a lot of them, so they’re filed in with either General Fiction or Sci-Fi/Fantasy. But we get so many of them from people selling their old books that we give them their own categories in the Used section.

what you describe seems intuitive to me but I've definitely been in bookstores that had a historical fiction section or even a historical YA fiction section. But that was bigger new bookstore. My feeling was that new book stores are more granular because they'll have many of the same and likely a tagging system for their website so it makes more sense to sort them by genre. But even the English section in small Lithuanian bookstores had Alice oseman next to Ali hazelwood and Terry Pratchett and Harry Potter one shelf lower. I'm gonna investigate the sorting system in every bookstore now tho.

Yeah, I think that particular one is a matter of scale. If you’re, say, Barnes & Noble, your fiction section can get as granular as you want because you have practically a whole city block of space and your own custom digital inventory system to keep track of what goes where. So I wouldn’t be that surprised to see a dedicated Historical Fiction section there — i do think it’s still taking the risk of customers not finding it if they don’t realize it’s a separate section, but i’m sure they can trial-and-error that out to figure out what level of granularity to employ.

(I would still be surprised to see a Rom-Com section, but I think I have seen pictures of “BookTok” displays, so… maybe not that surprised.)

I work at an independent bookstore with no digital inventory system, where shelf space is at a premium. So for us it doesn’t make sense to employ that same approach.

Honestly, I’m going to give the customers that one. They might just be more used to big chain stores that do do that kind of thing. That seems pretty reasonable. (And would also explain why they occasionally ask me if we sell coffee.) And if we take that as an explanation, then the issue really boils down to “why not read the signs to see what’s in each aisle instead of asking the clerk,” and that’s kind of just a hazard of retail generally.

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emilysidhe

Back in the early 2000s, the Barnes and Noble by me *sort of* had a rom-com section.

By which I mean, they had a romance section, but it was shelved like a comic book store: books were grouped by publisher, then by imprint, and only then by author’s last name. So if someone had asked for romantic comedies, a bookstore employee could have theoretically told them which Harlequin imprint specialized in contemporary romance that was also supposed to be funny, and which imprint from Avon did the same; showed them the two sections each could be found in; and let them browse.

(I don’t think that particular Barnes and Noble has a romance section at all anymore - a lot of it used to be taken up with direct-to-mass-market-paperback books and I expect ebook only publications have mostly replaced those, especially with traditional romance publishers being such early adopters. Any remaining print romance novels get shelved with the general fiction or other genres (like paranormal romance is in fantasy now instead of getting its own little imprint spots in the romance section.))

The most frustrating thing is when people can't find what they were looking for and rather than politely ask for help, they get pissy and say our way of organising is illogical. Ma'am, you were looking for a philosophy book in the classic literature section, we have a philosophy section.

(Also people bitching about the children section being "messy". Like yeah, we get dozens of kids everyday, sometimes really young, and they don't always put the books back where they're supposed to be. That's what children do. Plus we're understaffed because my boss is "trying to save money" so there's like four of us on a good day, we can't instantly put everything back together. Just let us know where the issue is and we'll fix it, you ain't gotta scold my coworkers like they're being lazy when you see them actively working.)

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Smoky the Bear Sign: Only You Can Reblog Art and Writing So More People see it

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unhing-ed

im so sorry to do this, but it's the most important thing my father ever taught me and he was so adamant about it. it is NOT smokey the bear but in fact just "Smokey Bear"

I learned there is another forest fire prevention mascot / original art+writing reblog reminder called Joe Beaver.

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Everyone: Laios is a generic blond human fighter!

Laios: Learns healing magic, can sense the presence of undead when nobody else can, is constantly being contacted by a higher power.

Y'all, Laios isn't a generic fighter. He's a paladin.

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I see his robot as an absolute win

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katsdom

OK - a very tangential takeoff: Engineering prof assigns students this question: Explain how to determine the height of a very tall building using a barometer.

Obviously meant to use change in barometric pressure with altitude. But one student submitted the following:

There are several ways of doing this

1. On a sunny day, stand the barometer up in the sun, measure the length of its shadow relative to its height, then measure the length of the building’s shadow and calculate its height from that.

2. Go into the stairwell and climb the stairs to the top, marking off the length of the barometer on the wall, giving you the height of the building in “barometer units”.

3. Go onto the roof of the building and drop the barometer off the top and time how long it takes to hit the ground, then calculate the height using the well known formula of 32 ft./sec./sec.

4. Go into the office of the building superintendent and say “If you tell me how tall this building is, I will give you this nice barometer”.

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thesundaytea

Newton….

This is basically any DnD party solving puzzles but with more success.

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Adults: Following rules is good, not following rules is bad

Little me: Okay :] *follows a rule*

Adults: Oh my god look at this loser. He doesn't know that this rule is Secretly Okay To Not Follow. Dumbass. Let's all laugh at him

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prokopetz

Well, now you've done it. You started thinking deeply about what the social and political infrastructures of your imagined world would have to look like for that weird porn scenario you came up with to make sense, thereby establishing a very specific set of mental associations, and now reading about residential zoning laws gives you a boner.

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dimetrodone

The true difference between an alien designed by a writer vs an artist is a writer gives an alien 16 fingers per hand while an artists gives them 3

Greek mythology

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theeskeleton

the horror you mustve felt as an amphora designer when they came out with the hundred handed ones...

Hesiod: Typhon has 100 snake heads on his shoulders

Artist: yeah no screw that

Hesiod: Cerberus has 50 heads

Pindar: Cerberus has 100 heads

Artist: three. three is a nice number

Homer: Scylla has 6 heads on her shoulders and 12 legs

Artist: you know what? I just wanna draw a topless weird mermaid

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maxmorkson

this is far from finished but I'm so excited about how this one is turning out, I need to show it off???

I've been reading on lighting and watching tutorials and I'm trying to push myself to go for more interesting choices. I am STRUGGLING but it feels like progress?! Hoping for it.