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fu k

@lorkhansdick

she/her, 19 electrical tape is holding my life together

Audrey R., who’s running for the OTW board, is apparently also currently running for office. As a Republican

so uhhhhhh keep that in mind when you’re voting

you’re saying this like a liberal who has the view of republicans.bad dems good and vote blue no mayter who.

y-yes? i sort of think the website that was founded because every other website was purging queer fanwork would be best served by someone who isn’t a member of the We Love Burning Books and Killing Gay People party. but that’s just the humble opinion of someone with a brain that works

For give me, but is this person running for Ao3 board and CONGRESSS at the same time??

Read Fairestcat’s breakdown of Audrey R’s answers to the OTW candidate Q&A for more in-depth reasons you probably don’t want to vote her onto the board https://fairestcat.dreamwidth.org/678527.html

Then read about all the other candidates and decide who you DO want to vote for -- there are 6 candidates and 4 open seats -- https://elections.transformativeworks.org/otw-elections-candidates/

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Reminder that if you want to vote AGAINST someone in the OTW Board elections, you need to NOT RANK THEM AT ALL. If you rank them last, you've still voted for them--just less enthusiastically than you've voted for everyone else.

Rank ONLY the candidates you would be WILLING to see win. DO NOT rank any candidates you would not be willing to see win.

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A real thing that happened is me as a teenager.

I had what turned out to be a dangerous walking pneumonia, for a week, but the manager at Burger King wouldn’t let me off.  My breathing was very loud and ragged.  I was coughing on and breathing on the food.

I wasn’t allowed to leave.  I was told if i called out, I was fired.

So Im shuffling around wheezing loudly swaying with my high fever as I work drive thru by myself, and a paramedic walked in to order dinner.

He goes ballistic, My friends.  He demands to see the Manager.  he chews him out at the top of his lungs so the whole restaurant can here.  Guys working the back came up to watch.  Customers staring and thinking hard about the infectious food they were eating.  Dude losing his shit about how infectious I was and all the people management had been endangering for days judging from my breathing and I needed to be home on antibiotics RIGHT NOW and the health Department was going to hear about this.

I went home.  i got the week off.  Didn’t even need a doctor’s note.

Getting friends management doesn’t know to do this WOULD WORK.

Same manager not letting me take my influenza home a year later  despite repeated vomiting?  Threw up in front of customers.  Customers demanded money back and started threatening the manager with lawsuits.

I got to go home and got time off until I stopped vomitting.

GO AHEAD and THROW UP in front of Customers.  THEY will Complain.

Don’t be shy.  

They are supposed to let you stay home when you are sick.  Stop protecting management. (Hiding how sick you are protects management).  They are abusing you.  Let them reap what they sow.

i'll tell you what converted me to being all-in on keeping cats indoors only:

living for a year and a half in a rural area with a sudden feral cat colony explosion on the property.

i moved in with my folks for a bit and at that time, one (1) stray cat mama had taken up residence on the property, but was too feral to let my mother anywhere near her. but especially after she brought three kittens around, mom fed her and the kittens in hopes they'd grow trusting enough she could catch for spay and neuter at the minimum. momcat stayed mean and hella wary, but the kittens would hang around a little nearer and play with my mom via long stick, but still wouldn't come close enough to touch or catch.

unfortunately, two of the three kittens were girls and started having kittens of their own before further progress was made, shortly after i moved in. and that was pretty much instant doom.

there were so many kittens. SO MANY. multiple litters. every time we turned around, more kittens.

we fed them. we hunted for and located the kittens every time anywhere on the property and would move them to a repurposed doghouse anytime a mama cat had them somewhere else, so that they could grow up human-socialized and we could spay/neuter them when they were old enough. (also it was a handy tactic to push the issue of the mamas getting more used to/trusting of us themselves. only really worked with one of them, though.)

and we watched them die.

we watched litter after litter of kittens never make it to the age they could be spayed or neutered. the moms stayed, for the longest time, too skittish to more than briefly touch, much less catch and crate for a vet visit.

it sounds like a silly joke to say i have kitten-related ptsd, but i absolutely do.

too many goddamn times i'd walk out of the garage and find the carport and gravel drive strewn with tiny bodies. others simply went missing, never to be found.

one in particular, i wish i hadn't found, and the visual literally haunts me still, almost a decade later.

i saw so many kittens die of snake bite, spider bite, wild dogs, birds of prey, hit by cars, respiratory illness, covered in fleas and eyes crusted with infection.

and we loved them all. scrimped for antibiotics if the vet could be convinced to give it to us despite our being unable to bring them in. bought flea collars and ointments. we cared for them and fed them and petted them and played with them, brushed their fur and cleaned up their little faces, put ice in their water in hot summer, rigged a heating lamp in their house in the winter.

and they died. horribly. that property is pocked with unmarked graves of kittens and cats.

all the best intentions, not enough resources, and it didn't matter anyways because the population went from three to almost twenty (at times, over thirty) in the blink of an eye.

they died and died and died. our hearts broke over and over again. the stress and anxiety wore us down like sandpaper. i think, by the end of it all, we managed to find less than 10 of them all homes, including batman the disabled kitten i found a home across the country through tumblr.

it was carnage and tragedy, frankly. and we were helpless.

it only ended because they started dying faster than they could be born, and because we finally caught the two remaining mom cats in traps and got them spayed.

the points about outdoor cats being invasive predators devastating to local wildlife populations is true and valid and important.

but i know cat people, and cat people who don't know better than to let cats outdoors. what matters to you is the cat itself, generally. the cat being happy and taken care of.

keeping cats outdoors, letting them outdoors, is not taking care of the cats. it's not protecting them. it's not giving them any happiness or invigoration that couldn't be provided to them as indoor-only pets with just a little research and effort.

they die. they get ill. they get hurt. they're at risk of predators, and cars, and disease, and carelessly cruel children and deliberately cruel adults. they're at risk of disappearing on you because someone else saw a cat outdoors and intervened to give it a better, safer life not in conflict with the local environment.

and if that offends and angers you that someone would just take a cat they saw roaming outdoors, even collared, and that it sounds like i'm endorsing that, i am, but not if you intervene and be that person yourself for your own cat.

if what matters to you is doing right by your cat because it's family and a living creature whose happiness and health and safety is important to you,

keep them indoors. not part time. always. exclusively.

I slept in and just woke up, so here's what I've been able to figure out while sipping coffee:

  • Twitter has officially rebranded to X just a day or two after the move was announced.
  • The official branding is that a tweet is now called "an X", for which there are too many jokes to make.
  • The official account is still @twitter because someone else owns @X and they didn't reclaim the username first.
  • The logo is 𝕏 which is the Unicode character Unicode U+1D54F so the logo cannot be copyrighted and it is highly likely that it cannot be protected as a trademark.
  • Outside the visual logo, the trademark for the use of the name "X" in social media is held by Meta/Facebook, while the trademark for "X" in finance/commerce is owned by Microsoft.
  • The rebranding has been stopped in Japan as the term "X Japan" is trademarked by the band X JAPAN.
  • Elon had workers taking down the "Twitter" name from the side of the building. He did not have any permits to do this. The building owner called the cops who stopped the crew midway through so the sign just says "er".
  • He still plans to call his streaming and media hosting branch of the company as "Xvideo". Nobody tell him.

This man wants you to give him control over all of your financial information.

Edit to add further developments:

  • Yes, this is all real. Check the notes and people have pictures. I understand the skepticism because it feels like a joke, but to the best of my knowledge, everything in the above is accurate.
  • Microsoft also owns the trademark on X for chatting and gaming because, y'know, X-box.
  • The logo came from a random podcaster who tweeted it at Musk.
  • The act of sending a tweet is now known as "Xeet". They even added a guide for how to Xeet.
  • The branding change is inconsistent. Some icons have changed, some have not, and the words "tweet" and "Twitter" are still all over the place on the site.
  • TweetDeck is currently unaffected and I hope it's because they forgot that it exists again. The complete negligence toward that tool and just leaving it the hell alone is the only thing that makes the site usable (and some of us are stuck on there for work).
  • This is likely because Musk was forced out of PayPal due to a failed credit line project and because he wanted to rename the site to "X-Paypal" and eventually just to "X".
  • This became a big deal behind the scenes as Musk paid over $1 million for the domain X.com and wanted to rebrand the company that already had the brand awareness people were using it as a verb to "pay online" (as in "I'll paypal you the money")
  • X.com is not currently owned by Musk. It is held by a domain registrar (I believe GoDaddy but I'm not entirely sure). Meaning as long as he's hung onto this idea of making X Corp a thing, he couldn't be arsed to pay the $15/year domain renewal.
  • Bloomberg estimates the rebranding wiped between $4 to $20 billion from the valuation of Twitter due to the loss of brand awareness.
  • The company was already worth less than half of the $44 billion Musk paid for it in the first place, meaning this may end up a worse deal than when Yahoo bought Tumblr.
  • One estimation (though this is with a grain of salt) said that Twitter is three months from defaulting on its loans taken out to buy the site. Those loans were secured with Tesla stock. Meaning the bank will seize that stock and, since it won't be enough to pay the debt (since it's worth around 50-75% of what it was at the time of the loan), they can start seizing personal assets of Elon Musk including the Twitter company itself and his interest in SpaceX.
  • Sesame Street's official accounts mocked the rebranding.
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When Statler and Waldorf go after you for your life choices, you seriously need to sit down and have a rethink.

Filming people without their consent is a massive issue of not only privacy but ableism that's been going on for many years.

It started out with filming more visibly disabled people, like high support needs autistic people having meltdowns in public and (especially fat) disabled people literally just using mobility aids, but once that was deemed less acceptable it moved to other things. Filming people acting "weird" in public. Eating weird foods. Falling asleep in weird places. Wearing weird things. Stimming. You get the idea. It's no longer safe to be visibly weird in public and that's an issue for a lot of disabled people. I recently had to lay down on the floor of a department store because I had an ME crash while out shopping. Not only did I have to worry about the normal things like people coming up to ask me if I'm ok, I also had to worry about some video of me at my lowest point, when I'm suffering immensely, being shared around as "haha look at this weird bitch on the floor". It's upsetting. It's scary.

And then there's fakeclaiming. A fun trend where people will film us in public to "prove" there's some kind of huge epidemic of people faking disability. Spoiler alert: there is not. Most of the time the people they film are real disabled people who don't fit into the expected mold for disability, usually service dog teams or people who use mobility aids who don't "look sick". And you would think this trend would be some kind of abled nonsense, but it's not. It's often other disabled people doing the fakeclaiming. Yes, there are some times when it's obvious a service dog isn't trained properly, but other than that, it's damn near impossible to tell if someone is faking a disability, and you're much more likely to target a disabled person than a faker. I'd love to say this trend was new, but it's been going on since the days of "the people of walmart" where many of the people posted were fat mobility aid users, always with the assumption that they used it because they were too fat or lazy to move on their own. In fact, the image of a fat person in a mobility cart has become almost synonymous with "lazy". It's one of the things that drove me to get my own expensive power wheelchair, to avoid the judgmental stares in the grocery store when I was just trying to exist, to avoid the fear of public shame. Even now when I stand up from my chair to walk to the bathroom stall or reach something on a high shelf, I watch the corners of my vision for that telltale phone in the air. I feel like I'm never safe from the judgemental eye of the internet, even when I'm logged off, and I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels that way.

Tik Tok, YouTube, Instagram, these places are all great for disabled people, especially those of us without access to the outside world. But it's also become a source of great anxiety for anyone who's uncontrollably "weird", mostly disabled people. Leave us alone, I'm begging you, we just want to go to the fucking grocery store in peace and safety.

Tl;dr

Stop filming people for "acting weird" or "faking a disability" in public. It's ableist, it's invasive, it's creepy, and it's humiliating. People don't exist in public for your amusement and especially not disabled people. You don't know who is disabled and who isn't no matter how many disabled people you've known or how sure you are that the person is faking.

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mannnnn not a nitrogen narcosis post on the dash that's fully lying about what causes it and the effects of it

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sorry but this is ridiculous... there isn't a 'subset of people' who are affected by it and we don't 'have no real idea why it happens to them'. it's nitrogen narcosis!! they literally REFER TO IT BY NAME IN THE POST!! you can open wikipedia and read a detailed breakdown of how and why it happens with diagrams and everything! aditionally there's no 'subset', it happens to literally everyone who goes down deep enough without special equipment! also it becomes a significant risk at 100 feet no 60 but I recognize that's nitpicky

just. why would anyone lie about this what's going onnnn

The funniest part is just skimming the link they provided pokes a bunch of holes in their post

We need to add wheelchairs to elder scrolls: skyrim. And we should make them look like cool thrones

Sumerian Veteran: *has severe PTSD but doesn't know it because the term won't be invented for another 5000 years* I fight the same battle in my dreams every night and my relationship with my family has fallen apart.

Sumerian Healer: *saw hundreds of veterans with the exact same affliction before* You're cursed by desert demons.

actually we have recorded texts of sumerian warriors describing symptoms that closely match ptsd, and the diagnoses was not desert demons, but rather "Those dudes you killed are still attacking you with their ghosts because you killed them"

good night. sleep tight. don’t let the bed bugs bite. tonight. imma fight. till we see the sunlight. tik tok. on the clock. but the party don’t stop.

You Make My World a Better Place to Find (1996-8) by Dario Robleto.

“For the past two years I have been secretly collecting lint, thread, etc., from friends, acquaintances and strangers (for example a piece of lint on someone’s shoulder, a hair hanging on a forearm.) I have connected all this debris into one long thread which I then spooled. From this spool of debris I repaired a blanket, a tiny pair of mittens, sewn buttons back on, repaired tears in clothes and various other things.”