Do Not Let HR do this to you. It is not illegal to talk about wages in the work place. I did and got a 12% raise!

True info. Now let me add something: The power of documentation. (I was a long time steward in a nurses union.)

Remember: The "'E" in email stands for evidence.

That cuts both ways. Be careful what you put into an email. It never really goes away and can be used against you.

But can also be a powerful tool for workplace fairness.

Case 1: Your supervisor asks you to do something you know is either illegal or against company policy. A verbal request. If things go wrong, you can count on them denying that they ever told you to do that. You go back to your desk, or wherever and you send them an email: "I just want to make sure that I understood correctly that you want me to do xxxxx" Quite often, once they see it in writing, they will change their mind about having you do it. If not, you have documentation.

Case 2: You have a schedule you like, you've had that schedule for a while, it works for you. Your supervisor comes to you and says "We're really short-handed now and I need you to change your schedule just for a month until we can get someone else hired. It's just temporary and you can have your old schedule back after a month." A month goes by and they forget entirely that they made that promise to you. So, once again, when they make the initial request, you send them an email "I'm happy to help out temporarily, but just want to make sure I understand correctly that I will get my old schedule back after a month as you promised." Documentation.

[Image ID: Text reading: In the middle of a busy clinic at our practice, I got pulled in by my manager to speak to HR, who must have made a special trip because she lives several states away, and told I was being 'investigated' for discussing wages with my other employees. She told me it was against company policy to discuss wages.

Me; That's illegal.

Them: (start italics) three slow, long seconds of staring at me blankly (end italics) Uh...

Me: That's an illegal policy to have. The right to discuss wages is a right protected by the National Labor Relations board. I used to be in a union. I know this.

HR: Oh, this is news to me! I have been working HR for 18 years and I never knew that. Haha. Well try not do do it anyway, it makes people upset, haha.

Me: people are entitled to their opinions about what their work is worth. Bye.

I then left, and sent her several texts and emails saying I would like a copy of their company policy to see where this wage discussion policy was kept. She quickly called me back in to her office.

HR: You know what, there is no policy like that in the handbook! I double check. Sorry about the confusion, my apologies.

Me: You still haven't given me the paper saying that we had this discussion. I am going to need some protection against retaliation.

HR: Oh haha yes here you go.

I just received a paper with legal letterhead and an apology saying there was no verbal warning or write up. Don't even take their shit you guys. Keep talking about wages. Know your worth. /End ID]

At one of my old (shit) jobs my boss would continually come have these verbal discussions with me and would never put anything in writing I took to summarizing every discussion we had in email. Like “just to confirm that you asked me to do X by Y date and you understand that means I won’t be able to complete the previous task you gave me until Z date - 2 weeks later than originally scheduled - because you want me to prioritize this new project.

The woman would then storm back into my office screaming at me for putting the discussion in writing and arguing about pushing back the other project or whatever. At which point I would summarize that conversation in email as well. Which would bring her storming back in, rinse and repeat ad nauseum.

Anyway I cannot imagine how badly that job would have gone if I hadn’t put all her wildly unreasonable demands in writing. Bitch still hated me but she could never hang me for “missing deadlines” because I always had in writing that she’d pushed the project back because she wanted something else done first.

Paper your asses babes. Do not let them get away with shit. If they won’t put what they’re asking you to do in writing then write it up yourself and email it to them.

sacred objects

Let us just appreciate that this person’s dad didn’t know when they would be home and so he couldn’t plan for them to be able to join the family for dinner, but he knew with no doubts that dear sweet Meatloaf staying in that exact position for hours was an absolute in this scenario. Truly, that cat was named well.

one of my favorite posts on tumblr over the course of 5 fucking years.. clearly i need a life

Meatloaf is a reliable cat and did not steal the money for selfish reasons. A rare friend.

I love Meatloaf. :)

Bless Meatloaf

Reblog Money Meatloaf to get surprise $40

Always reblog Meatloaf!

If the door’s locked, try the wall

[by Geoff Manaugh]

a drywall knife

In one of the most interesting moments in his memoir, [jewelry thief Bill Mason] sees that architecture can be made to do what he wants it to do; it’s like watching a character in Star Wars learn to use the Force.

In a lengthy scene at a hotel in Cleveland that Mason would ultimately hit more than once in his career, he explains that his intended prize was locked inside a room whose door was too closely guarded for him to slip through. Then he realizes the obvious: he has been thinking the way the hotel wanted him to think—the way the architects had hoped he would behave—looking for doors and hallways when he could  simply carve a new route where he wanted it. The ensuing realization delights him. “Elated at the idea that I could cut my own door right where I needed one,” he writes, Mason simply breaks into the hotel suite adjacent to the main office. There, he flings open the closet, pushes aside the hangers, and cuts his way from one room into the other using a drywall knife. In no time at all, he has cut his “own door” through to the manager’s office, where he takes whatever he wants—departing right back through the very “door” he himself made. It is architectural surgery, pure and simple.

Later, Mason actually mocks the idea that a person would remain reliant on doors, making fun of anyone who thinks burglars, in particular, would respect the limitations of architecture. “Surely if someone were to rob the place,” he writes in all italics, barbed with sarcasm, “they’d come in as respectable people would, through the door provided for the purpose. Maybe that explains why people will have four heavy-duty locks on a solid oak door that’s right next to a glass window.” People seem to think they should lock-pick or kick their way through solid doors rather than just take a ten-dollar drywall knife and carve whole new hallways into the world. Those people are mere slaves to  architecture, spatial captives in a world someone else has designed for them.

Something about this is almost unsettlingly brilliant, as if it is nonburglars who have been misusing the built environment this whole time; as if it is nonburglars who have been unwilling to question the world’s most basic spatial assumptions, too scared to think past the tyranny of architecture’s long-held behavioral expectations.

To use architect Rem Koolhaas’s phrase, we have been voluntary prisoners of architecture all along, willingly coerced and browbeaten by its code of spatial conduct, accepting walls as walls and going only where the corridors lead us. Because doors are often the sturdiest and most fortified parts of the wall in front of you, they are a distraction and a trap. By comparison, the wall itself is often more like tissue paper, just drywall and some two-by-fours, without a lock or a chain in sight. Like clouds, apartment walls are mostly air; seen through a burglar’s eyes, they aren’t even there. Cut a hole through one and you’re in the next room in seconds.

~ Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar’s Guide to the City

My name is Helga Sinclair. I’m acting on behalf of my employer, who has a most intriguing proposition for you. Are you interested?

ATLANTIS: THE LOST EMPIRE (2001)

She was peak character design, no one has done better since

I've been rolling something around in my head.

If everyone receives Minimum Basic Income, what happens to all the relationships where one of the individuals no longer has to depend on the other(s) to survive?

Just let that marinate for a moment.

Not just the economic landscape but the social landscape could be transformed.

Not for nothing, but this is literally part of the entire point of Universal Basic Income.

When abused people can just literally walk away, knowing they can still have enough money to live, the world will be a lot less sheltering of abusers and that is a massive fucking benefit.

It gets better than that, if we go with my ideal UBI scenario, in which we peg UBI to "enough to live in any major metropolitan city in the country" and do NOT adjust it for cost of living.

Suddenly, the poverty and scrabbling for survival of rural areas? Gone. That UBI will go a whole long fucking way out there. Suddenly, people who had to move to the cities to get jobs that paid enough? Can afford to move back. Heck, they can afford to get decent fucking broadband out there and continue working, just, not in the city. Suddenly, people who live in rural areas but want to move to the cities with like-minded people? That's affordable, too. Suddenly, people who want to have a bigger house, but are stuck in a tiny apartment in a city? They can afford to move out to where there are bigger houses.

Universal Basic Income would realign our whole damn society, and I think it would long-term be for the better.

did you know that, besides the apple of knowledge and the pomegranate of life, there’s another mystic fruit, one that grants you a sense of purpose?

yeah, it’s the raisin d’être

…OW.

:)

Me, sometimes, out of nowhere, at no specific time and for no specific reason.

Does this work for you?

@siverfanweedo

I can do this all day

Plus one I made for my friend, 17.

@zylauniverse

@rookeryblue

Can you make the dr pepper one w the trans shirt. The first one validated me enough but i

@fishing-lesbian-catgirl

@crotchapple

@amantesmortem

@shit-garbage

Oof

Adding some I had in another post because people couldn't find them

@thisismisogynoir

For this guy

I see posts go by periodically about how modern audiences are impatient or unwilling to trust the creator. And I agree that that's true. What the posts almost never mention, though, is that this didn't happen in a vacuum. Audiences have had their patience and trust beaten out of them by the popular media of the past few decades.

J J Abrams is famous for making stories that raise questions he never figures out how to answer. He's also the guy with some weird story about a present he never opened and how that's better than presents you open--failing to see that there's a difference between choosing not to open a present and being forbidden from opening one.

You've got lengthy media franchises where installments undo character development or satisfying resolutions from previous installments. Worse, there are media franchises with "trilogies" that are weird slap fights between the makers of each installment.

You've got wildly popular TV shows that end so poorly and unsatisfyingly that no one speaks of them again.

On top of that, a lot of the media actively punishes people for engaging thoughtfully with it. Creators panic and change their stories if the audience properly reacts to foreshadowing. Emotional parts of storytelling are trampled by jokes. Shocking the audience has become the go to, rather than providing a solid story.

Of course audiences have gotten cynical and untrusting! Of course they're unwilling to form their own expectations of what's coming! Of course they make the worst assumptions based on what's in front of them! The media they've been consuming has trained them well.

terfs keep mentioning the % of autistics who are trans/nb and that we're 'brainwashed'

and because i'm an asshole, i decided to look into why so many autistic folks are trans/nb. it's not an inaccurate statement, at least the first half, but terfs lie through their teeth so i decided to get to the scientific root of it.

the answer blew my fucking mind.

the study on gender and autism i found said two very specific things about autistic people: we are more mentally resistant to things like social conditioning and binarism. we like our secret third things, y'know.

an excerpt:

“The finding that non-binary identities are most elevated seems to support hypotheses focussed on autistic resistance to social conditioning, which are consistent with existing evidence of the same effect with respect to self-description of sexual orientation. Perhaps elevated rates of trans identity in autism might result from a rejection of the binary cisgenderist norm, which combined with a below-typical concern for social norms could promote the disclosure of the identity.”

94% of autistics surveyed for that paper identified themselves as non-binary.

other studies have found autistic people have higher levels of critical thinking, and require more evidence to maintain or convert to a belief system (hence why many of us eventually fall away from religion) than allistic people.

which means, at least from my perspective, that:

a) the 'brainwashing' terfs are accusing the trans community of inflicting on autistic folks would likely not even work if they tried.

b) the current binary definition of gender flies directly against embedded autistic modes of thinking to begin with.

you cannot brainwash someone into thinking something they already believe.

This essentially suggests that autistic people are likely to be NB because we are in fact resistant to the relevant brainwashing.

[copied from a reply by @maxens]

you guys know you can get USB connectable CD, dvd, and blu-ray players right. and you can buy external hard drives with crazy amounts of space for an amount of money that would make the average person from 2009’s head explode bc of how cheap it is. and if you do this and get ripping software such as handbrake for CDs and DVDs and makeMKV for blurays you can both own a physical copy of whatever media you want and make it accessible to yourself no matter where you are. do you guys know this

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

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

Edit to add further developments:

A conversation between my D&D character and the Dread Lord that lives in her head.

-----

Priss lay in the grass made damp by the ever present fog. She tucked her hooves under her barrel. Normyn had said she looked like a loaf when sitting like this, but she didn't see the resemblance. It was simply a comfortable position to meditate. She drew her’s, or rather Mara's, sword and held it horizontally before her, resting the flat of the blade on a forearm.

"You know," a velvety voice spoke inside her, "I'm in your head. I see what you see. Hear what you hear. Think what you think." The sensation of fingers being traced up her spine, "feel what you feel. Priss, dear. You needn't have the sword out to commune with me."

"No, but it helps me concentrate. I don't need a holy symbol to commune with my God either, but it helps."

"Ah yes. Your God. You know, with the three of us, it's getting pretty crowded up here. Have you considered forsaking them and turning to me for power?"

She sighed, "you think what I think. You know I considered it. Briefly. A crisis of faith. But my deity has been with me my whole life, and I won't forsake them the moment they have a little trouble reaching me."

The voice seemed to move, whispering, intangible lips brushing her ear, "have you considered that they have forsaken you?"

"They have not." She squeezed the hilt, and lightning arced up the blade. A thread of red tracing through the center of the bolt, "my power comes from them. Even if they're unable to directly communicate through the mist, the connection is still there."

"And what if they have abandoned you, and I'm simply the one you're drawing power from?" The voice shifted to whisper in her other ear, "We have already made deals, you know."

"I suppose that's a possibility. But that's the point of faith, is it not?"

"I suppose it is!" The voice sounded yards away. Distracted.

Priss sighed again, "I hope you're at least enjoying your time away from that house."

"Ohhhh, I am, Priss! Such sights to see! Though I do wish you were a freer hand with my sword." The voice was suddenly close again, and Priss felt a hand painfully squeezing the arm that held the sword, "I desire to taste blood on it's edge again."

Priss rolled her shoulder, attempting to shake the arm off. Fruitlessly, given the incorporeal nature of the hand of the woman in her mind. "Servants of Strahd abound. I don't doubt there will be opportunities to feed your blade in time."

The voice shifted to her other side, and hissed, full of barely contained anger, "then stop hiding behind your friends." The voice rose, louder only to Priss, "STEP CONFIDENTLY INTO BATTLE. STRIKE FAST. STRIKE HARD. VANQUISH YOUR FOES AND BATHE IN THEIR BLOOD!" Mara broke into full throated laughter that faded as she moved farther away from Priss. At least in the metaphysical sense. The voice was once again right next to Priss. She felt a forehead press against hers. She felt lips brush her nose as Mara purred, "there's blood in your friends. You could spill it right now."

"Mara. I'm not going to hurt my friends. We'll find someone deserving to sate your hunger."

"PROMISES. EMPTY PROMISES!" She shouted at Priss, "always promises! Never action. Always you promise blood for my blade, then you stay far off from danger and cast your little spells."

"You know as well as I that I'm a mediocre sword hand at best. When the battle is life or death, I can't risk fumbling your blade at a critical thrust."

Priss felt Mara's arm overlaid on her own. She felt her arm lift, and her wrist point the blade true, "then work harder on your lessons."

Priss rocked on her barrel and shuffled to her hooves. She slipped her arm through the strap of her shield, and used her teeth to pull it taught. Allowing Mara to move her limbs into the starting position of the routine they had gone over a hundred times. "Don't forget," Priss said, adjusting her rear hooves, "I have more legs than you."

"It would be easier if you would agree to lose that blasted shield. No better defence than overwhelming your enemies, and you are asking me to train you in a fighting style I haven't touched since I was a child!"

Priss looked at her shield. The mark of her Deity carved into the inside curve, matching the inlay design on the front. She silently hoped there was no symbolism in this as she undid the straps, and hung the shield from her saddlebag. She allowed Mara to move her hands into a proper two hander grip. She felt more than heard a sigh of contentment from Mara.

--*--

Hours later, Priss shook herself, trying to free the sweat that lathered her flank. She sighed. She might need to ask for help brushing that out.

"Can you wait, Priss?" Mara whispered into her ear, "can you wait to drive my blade home? To thrust it into the bodies of anyone who stands in your way? Like I did to you?"

Priss automatically ran a finger across the scar on her abdomen. Ireena's healing magic had stopped the bleeding, but the magical nature of the blade had ensured the scar remained. A permanent reminder of their battle. "Am I really standing in your way? Well, anymore at least."

Mara was silent a minute. Priss felt her gently run a finger along the scar, "yes and no." Mara answered eventually, "we both want Strahd out of the scene. However, once Strahd is vanquished, that is where our goals diverge. I want them deposed. I want to sit atop the throne they occupy—"

"And I," Priss said, continuing her sentence, "want to go home."

"Destined to be adversaries once more," Mara said, tracing a muscle along Priss' flank. "Diverging goals," Mara continued, "isn't our only point of contention. You have a frustratingly passive tactic. Skulking about when we should be confronting Strahd, sword in hand!"

Priss trotted over to her pack and retrieved her brush, "I'm sorry to break it to you, but you're currently stuck in the body of a mortal. We need to make better preparations before we can confront Strahd."

"Well, if you die, I'll still be fine."

Priss paused, mid brush, "are you truly here? With me? Was it simply an aspect of you in the sword? Are you still in the house?"

"Yes!" Mara said, cheerfully, "Both!" She continued, "perhaps neither!" She finished.

"That is...a shockingly unhelpful answer."

"Our souls have become one, Priss. We are where we are."

"Well, our strategies evolve with the circumstances. Perhaps we'll find ourselves employing a less passive tact soon. Either way, I have no doubt we'll make it to the end game together."

"And what then, Priss?"

"I've been thinking on that a lot, actually. You think what I think, so I suspect you know of my plans." She paused to focus on brushing a particularly stubborn patch of lather, "you’re right. When we defeat Strahd, we'll be at a crossroads. You're a Dread Lord, and our souls are intertwined. I don't think I'd be able to stand against what you decide."

"Not likely, no!"

"Then there's something I want you to consider."

"What's that?"

"Freedom or power."

Mara was silent. Priss could hear her breathing, though she lacked a body. Maybe it was her own breathing?

Priss continued, "Mara, how many centuries were you in that house?"

"Too many to count. And more."

"How many centuries before ruling a shitty valley with three shitty villages feels no less confining?"

"What, dear Priss, are you proposing?"

"Simply something to think about. When we defeat Strahd, if you think we should place ourselves at the head of the realm, I'll be there right alongside you to put us in the role. But consider. We defeat Strahd, leave Ismark in charge of the realm. We leave this place and have all the planes of existence before us. Freedom or power."

"Freedom or power," Mara repeated.

Oh hey, finally got a side blog up for writing.

MY D&D character is in love with the Dread Lord that lives in her head.

I don't resent A Song of Ice and Fire for itself, per se. I resent it by proxy for all of the "GrItTtY dArK fAnTaSy" we had to slog through for a decade after Game of Thrones became popular, and that is still impacting the way people write fantasy in the modern day (a particular sore spot for me is that Baldur's Gate III is being made by the same people who made the Divinity series and I can already tell that's going to be fucking miserable).

ASOIaF (and early Game of Thrones) was dark, yes, but at its heart it was surprisingly optimistic and idealistic. It was a world in which doing what was good and right was always hard, often unrewarding and would sometimes get you killed, but you should still do it anyway because goddamnit it's the right thing to do. Bad things happened to good people because they wouldn't compromise their own morality, but the books (and the early seasons of the show) never portrayed these peoples' choices as meaningless or worthless.

Writers of lesser talent and vision looked at GRRM's work and saw good people dying for refusing to compromise their morality, and their takeaway from it was "morality is meaningless" and we've been mired in this miserable genre of fantasy that @sahonithereadwolf named "mudcore" for more than a decade now - and worse, even Game of Thrones eventually fell prey to it.

It's not really GRRM's fault people didn't have the correct takeaway from A Song of Ice and Fire but I still can't quite shake the resentment of how it's shaped fantasy fiction over most of my adulthood.

Day number infinity of wishing mass effect was a horror series , just lean a bit more into it for me please . PLEASE

I want characters to be visibly scared and characters that cry and characters that have to question if this is worth it and characters that seems a bit too close to slipping into indoctrination . I want Shepard to struggle I want Shepard to realized they’ re just like Saren I want Shepard to be the prophet of the end but I also want Shepard to be a person . I want indoctrination in the crew I want the chance to lose and have indoctrination slowly take you I want crewmates to show signs I want Shepard to either try and slow it or give in and accept it . I want the horrors of breaking an impossible cycle I want the reaper forces to make characters so viscerally uncomfortable and make the player realize just how cruel the cycle is I want collectors to be like an echo of you I want Sovereign and Harbinger to haunt Shepards every waking moment I want the nightmares to be so visceral Shepard wakes up screaming . I want characters to be bloody and gore covered yet they hate it I want characters that are so noticeably affected by indoctrination it manifests physically I want characters that love you but love the idea of you waking up tomorrow just a strongly i want characters that demand help I want characters that know something is wrong before Shepard dares to think about it .

Keep the shooter military aspect idgaf just indulge in the horror of trying to beat The cycle of Death

It’s called “environmental amnesia” and it’s an actual issue environmentalists discuss how to combat. The climate crisis makes it more widespread but it’s been something that’s happening for generations. The story of The Lorax describes it beautifully. The idea that what you remember is what you consider normal, but if the changes happen slowly over generations, you don’t see how large they are because you don’t personally remember them being very different, even if you were told stories about it.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and left for college and grad school. I would tell my friends that the PNW was this magical place where it rained all the time but you never got wet. And we didn’t - the rain was more like mist, so you could walk around in a cotton sweatshirt or w/e and be totally fine. I moved home about a decade after I’d left, and, well, the rain I remember doesn’t happen anymore. It’s infrequent and heavy. We have thunderstorms now, something we never had when I was a kid. Like, yeah, things are wildly different from 50 years ago. But things are also wildly different from just 10 years ago, too.

If a flaming old queen in a cape wants to kill off racists in power I say have at it

That wasn’t even his plan!! His plan was to make the senator a mutant, so he’d have to advocate for mutants or be destroyed by his own policy, and tbh. It’s the best villain plan I’ve ever seen. The goo was the plan unexpectedly failing. 9/10 only bc he was going to kill Rogue. Next time use someone willing to sacrifice herself for the cause, pls. No further notes

I like how his plan in like real world terms, was to turn desantis gay but instead he exploded