@the-emef / the-emef.tumblr.com
Co-eds with their books go to school on skates. Miss Lucile Pfaender (left) and Miss Maryellen Falconer, co-eds at the University of Chicago, roll merrily down the Midway on their roller skates, 1930. University of Chicago Archival Photographic Files.
Class-to-class monotony is broken up by this means of locomotion, and at the same time the exercise is extremely healthful. The fad, which the students have followed for several years, is a certain sign of spring.
i bet daniel craig and rachel weisz are engaged in forms of full time kink we can't even comprehend. like if he leaves even one speck of crust on her tea sandwiches she puts him in a christening gown and hunts him on their estate
kill the shift manager in your brain
you are not wasting time you are vibing. you are not being unproductive you are literally chilling. make a grill cheese with cheddar cheese and slather a piece of the bread with some honey and maybe you'll relax
A Selection of Elaborate Keys Designed by Rudolf Hammel from MAK Collection Online. These four were fabricated by Emil Kurczak in Vienna, dating before 1903.
Ever since I got a job as a security guard I can’t take heist movies seriously anymore.
Why is that?
Accurate heist movie: The Team is sneaking into a high security facility. An alarm is triggered, they freeze, prepared to knock out whoever responds to the alarm. It takes 40 minutes for someone to respond. When they finally do show up, they shuffle along, annoyed, arms full of 16 bags of pretzels for some reason, and reset the alarm without bothering to check their surroundings. They report that the alarm went off in error. Security control starts a fight about the correct designation of the door. The guard announces that they’re leaving the alarm key in the alarm because it’s always going off for no reason. No one challenges them on this. They shuffle away, leaving an alarm key and several bags of pretzels behind.
The Team knocks out a security guard and steals their radio. The team mimic can perfectly replicate the knocked out guard’s voice. They get caught because they pronounced the name of the company correctly.
The Team disables an alarm. The only way to do this is to rip it out of the wall and disassemble it until it physically can’t make noise anymore. This very loud process is clearly heard by the posted security guard nearby, who rolls their eyes and text their supervisor that the logistics contractors are fooling with the alarms again.
The Team breaks into the facility at night. There they meet a single security guard who is chanting potential names for NPCs in their DnD campaign out loud while they do their patrols. They encounter a fire extinguisher. They pause in their chanting to check that it is properly charged and to apply a sticker that reads, “Anal use only”. This guy is disgustingly good at their job. There’s no way around it, they’re going to catch you. And you’re going to have to deal with the fact that you’ve been had by someone who has a supply of stickers that say “Anal use only” and who unironically wanted to name their NPC shopkeep Mammogrammus.
The Team attempts to bribe a security guard. This is its own post but know there’s no way in hell that would work.
The Team breaks into the high security room and disables all the alarms. Security control sends several guards to investigate why there are no alarms going off.
The Team attempts to break into the high security room but can’t because it’s randomly decided not to let anyone at all in today.
The Team steals a keycard with “””””unlimited””””” access to the facility and gets caught because the computer system that manages keycards randomly revokes access for no reason.
The Team walks past a security guard in broad daylight wearing T-shirts that say, “We are here to rob you”. The security guard does nothing, having seen several people in logistics wearing that exact shirt two days prior.
This sounds like a great movie, honestly
I will always remember that when I worked for a pharmaceutical company in IT, there were massive security procedures, systems with air gaps, locations with biometric scanners and metal detectors and locking revolving doors, but the highest level of security was a human being in a bulletproof proof room with line of sight to the door and a button. To /get/ to the door, you had to go through tons of other layers and badge access and identity verification, but the final lock was a dual physical key (which required two people to open) and a human being with a book of photographs and a button to push.
At the onset of the 2008-onward recession it became more or less impossible to get the sort of summer gig that college students traditionally get. I couldn’t get a callback from any of the area fast food restaurants, the babysitting gigs were gone, I drew blanks on waitressing, dishwashing, landscaping, car washes, summer camps, you name it. The big local summer attraction near me is a horse racetrack, and I put in apps for every position from betting clerk to horse manure removal tech. I got one (1) job offer that summer, and it was to be a security guard. I was a 19 year old girl with a perky ponytail, big ol’ doe eyes, and no experience or interest whatsoever in policing, so I genuinely thought I’d gotten the offer because they’d confused my application with someone else’s… until the first day of training.
Training consisted of a number of retired high ranking New York State Troopers very earnestly trying to convince a room of “dudes who desperately wanted to be a cop but couldn’t jump even that low hurdle” and also “one increasingly incredulous 19 year old girl who could only hear a loud high pitched note in one ear because she stood too close to her amps at the punk show last night” not to bring swords, shurukens, or butterfly knives into work.
We went over the “do not bring in your own weapons” lecture for the majority of day 1 of training. Day 2 was also “do not bring in your own weapons” for a lot of the day, then we moved onto “identifying the different types of fire extinguisher,” and wrapped up the day with “wasp stings.” Well, actually during “wasp stings” we had a sidebar when this one guard who looked like Ben Franklin raised his hand and shared that he, personally, took care of wasps by blowing their nests up with improvised gasoline-based explosives, so technically we wrapped up the day with “do not bring in your own weapons even if those weapons are to harm a wasp.”
Day 3 was a half day, where we reviewed everything we’d learned about no weapons, fire extinguishers, and wasps, and then we took a written test, which I finished with a perfect score in three minutes so Sargeant Minetti made me grade everyone else’s. After that, I was a full ass security guard; I picked up my fake cop uniform, badge(!!!), tiny notebook, strapped a walkie to my belt, and was given my assignment. My beat was very very literally the most public facing one that existed; while most of my colleagues were posted at gates that might never get opened for the entire summer, I had “the wholeass quarter mile of pavement abutting the chain link fence that separated the public from the ponies.” My responsibilities were simple:
1. tell people to move their rolling coolers out of the fire lane
2. take people with wasp stings to the nurse
and oh yeah
3. every time a clerk at a betting window in my section accumulated more than $10,000 dollars in cash, I had to escort them for ½ of a mile through the incredibly dense crowd of drunk people, any of whom might be interested in stealing more than $10,000 dollars, and get the money safely into the giant vault.
I remember the very first run i made. The betting clerk looked at me, the 19 year old responsible for protecting both them and $10,000. I looked back at him through the mirrored aviators that I’d bought at a gas station for 5 bucks because I thought it was very very funny and good fake cop cosplay. My walkie hissed ominously.
“…Uh, so if someone tries to take the money, what are you going to do?” He asked.
“Well, I get paid 12 bucks an hour, so… nothing.” I responded. “How about you?”
We quickly arrived at an understanding.
Two of the guards from my training group got fired that summer for bringing in their own weapons, and at least one of them had both a butterfly knife and at least one shuruken. Many more dropped out as they discovered that they would not actually be doing Die Hard shit. As for me, I did literally nothing to prevent crime all summer, but I also halfheartedly cleared a path through the crowd at the front of a very sad “St. Patrick’s Day In July” parade, which made me enough of a success story that they actually called me unprompted to ask if I’d come back the next year… with one caveat.
See, the next year I returned as a weathered veteran with a spotless disciplinary record, so they gave me three hours of additional training to get a certification to become a peace officer. As a result, from ages 20-23 (when my license expired) I had the same legal powers of arrest as a police officer.
Me. They just gave me that.
In conclusion, if you’re a highly qualified team of heistmen looking to rob an entity that accumulates wealth by convincing drunk desperate people to give them their money and you pick a fucking casino when the racetrack is right there, you’re either thinking way too inside the box… or you have a healthy fear of shurukens I guess.
Only valid response to this post, everyone else can go home.
“Most people who commit serious harm never get to the point where they can admit to their harmful actions, much less apologize and aim to repair them. Their shame leads to denial and self-deception that overrides their ability to orient toward reality. No person can be more honest with us than they can be with their own self. Before you open up a conversation with a person who has harmed you, keep in mind that protecting yourself comes first. Reduce your expectations to zero for getting the response you want and deserve. Speak your truths because you need to speak for your own self—because this is the ground you want to stand on, irrespective of whatever response you receive. A heartfelt apology is unlikely to be forthcoming, now or ever. No individual will feel accountable and genuinely remorseful—no matter how well you communicate—if doing so threatens to define him or her in an intolerable way. The other person’s willingness to own up to harmful deeds has nothing to do with how much she or he does or doesn’t love you. Rather, the capacity to take responsibility, feel empathy and remorse, and offer a meaningful apology rests on how much self-love and self-respect that person has available. We don’t have the power to bestow these traits on anyone but ourselves.”
— Harriet Lerner (something my mother read to me this morning)
One of the most life-changing things I ever learned came from Mythbusters, where they tested and proved (with cognitive testing puzzles and reaction time tests) that lying down and resting with the intention to sleep STILL provided significant mental benefits over just staying awake, even if a person couldn’t fall asleep in the amount of time they had.
It helps me to actually sleep to know that just lying down with my eyes closed is still doing me some good, and helps me to not freak out/beat myself up when I stay up later than intended. Any amount of rest is better than no rest!
So if you didn’t know that…now you do
do you know that i think of this post every time i can’t sleep op. what mythbusters did for you, you have done for a great many others.
I mean I think people should curate their own fandom experience and whatnot and it's perfectly fair to just avoid things one is uncomfortable with...
That being said. From personal experience? Immunizing myself to all my discomforts by browsing through pixiv and kink memes with raised eyebrows while searching for things I am interested in back when tagging was non-existent has really made my fandom experience much more pleasant nowadays.
I have preferences, for sure. But I have no fear. I have no cringe. The filthiest, grossest fanwork holds no powers over me. I am a god.
Like honestly dl;dr and block on sight is respectable and all but I genuinely think everyone could just benefit from purposefully exposing yourself to your nOTP and non-triggering squicks sometimes? (And obviously don't go bother the creators for it.) If only so that it makes it easier/safer to search for content you like without living in fear of accidentally glimpsing something you hate and having that ruin your day.
Training oneself to be comfortable with mild discomfort is a highly under-rated skill in this day and age
I think its interesting that "desensitized" is a dirty word now. Like...when I did my therapy, being desensitized was the GOAL. It was the fucking dream.
But also, desensitization essentially gives you the agency to say, "okay so that felt bad, now I can either put it away, really explore and understand what that discomfort is trying to tell me, or discard it." Idk...some of yall are so fucking distressed all the time and you call it "being normal" or "being a decent human being" but...it isn't normal to be distressed all the time. It isn't decent to be distressed all the time. And like...I have disords and chemical shit going on in my brain but if you don't have all that....I think you need to look at your distress and ask why it is actually enduring and who benefits from you being distressed (lessons from a pre-bush era american).
also, I can’t help thinking about survival bias. If you say that you benefited from purposely exposing yourself to things that made you uncomfortable, then none of those things made you feel so uncomfortable that you went away and never came back
I keep thinking about trigger warnings. Like people used to eyeroll so hard (I mean maybe they still do, for all I know, but it isn’t in the news so much) about trigger warnings, and for years I had conversation after conversation with people, especially white male-presenting people, in which I tried to explain that of course to them it just sounds like trigger warnings are about being afraid of new things. Of course to them it’s impossible to imagine that it’s about risks to to mental health. Most media is designed by them and for them - obviously it only contains stuff that most of them are cool with
years ago I was having brunch with a fanperson who had been a BNF before I was even a legal adult. I’d seen her fandom name in the ‘thank you’ sections of half the X-Files fic I read in the 90s. she told me about a fandom term that I don’t even remember now except for how it evolved from one - just one - person in the 90s who had expressed very strong feelings about fics with sad endings. Famously, for a while at least, fics were labelled as “friendly” for that person or “not-friendly” for that person, and this continued long enough for some people to continue using the label without even knowing who is referred to, presumably because they got the gist of what it was supposed to mean
what I’m saying is, I never got the feeling that this was perceived as authors bowing down to the demands of a selfish fanperson who couldn’t bear to see anything they disagreed with. The feeling I got was: aren’t people on the internet amazing? Sometimes they care so much about a friend that they’ll come up with entirely new vocabulary so that friend knows they’re welcome here
anyway I work with children and young adults and they are far more able to subject themselves to discomfort than I am. They are also way more able to verbalize their experiences than I was at their age. So maybe they ARE comfortable with mild discomfort, and really what’s bothering the olds is that they aren’t quiet enough about it
I’m so impressed by the energy and passion in this project, and of course I agree with the goal, but I am wondering: wouldn’t it make sense to channel some of this energy into volunteering with the OTW and implementing the changes being called for? The impression I’m getting from the OTW is that they largely already agree that the issues being pointed out are problems (as it says in the blog description they have acknowledged it years ago) and they would like to address them, they just don’t have the people to actually do that. If they did, presumably they already would have done it, right?
I’ve done some volunteer work in other organizations and every one of them had long lists of stuff they wanted to do, and every year similar wishes were brought up by new people coming in, but most of those things never happened because the people in the org spent most of their time just keeping the org running. That’s not to say that changes didn’t happen - they did, just slowly, and one at time. But each change required people in the org to either stop doing whatever work they were already doing and instead work on implementing the change, or for new people to come in and do it.
In my experience, if you want to see change in volunteer-based organizations, you need to be that change.
This response is going to be lengthy, so buckle in. And while this response may get a bit intense, it is not necessarily directed right at the asker. This is just a common deflection tactic we have seen time and again when people call for change.
To start, we’d like to remind everyone that we are only five individuals. The OTW might need more volunteers, but adding five more people to the bucket, when the OTW has around 1,000 volunteers, isn’t going to address the issue.
Secondly, it has come to light - thanks in part to our protest - that the OTW is dealing with some serious structural issues including an inability to address problems because of the over-dependence on the Legal Department. These issues both mean that the OTW isn’t in the position to onboard as many volunteers as it needs and that volunteers are being harmed while being unable to enact the change they wish to see. Adding five more bodies into the mix would just result in five more volunteers being harmed by the OTW’s dysfunction.
We have little faith that, should we enter the organization for the purpose of change we would not be undermined and hung out to dry much like Chinese fans have been recently.
We agree with you (and the org does too!) that they do not have the actual people to do the work that needs to be done. Which is why we are specifically calling for them to do what they said they would in order to get it done: hire people who can actually do it.
We currently, with this action and platform we are building, see ourselves as very much part of the change we want to see. Enacting structural change requires a multi-faceted approach. It needs voices outside an organization who are willing to speak up in identifying issues they see with the organization’s work, like Stitch and Dr. Pande. It needs the willingness of those within the organization to facilitate and enact change. But it also needs accountability. We feel our role as users impacted by the OTW’s actions (or inactions) but outside the organization itself, allows us to act as voices of accountability, to hold the OTW to its promises and demand it live up to its ideals and responsibilities. Our role cannot be fulfilled within the organizational structure itself.
Volunteering is an act of labor that we feel we are currently engaging in within a space we feel safe doing so. Asking fans of color to volunteer to make changes within an organization with known toxicity and abuse towards its volunteers, that we know does not do enough to protect even its users from racial abuse, to join up to ‘fix’ things, to expect that we are the ones that should do the hard work of restructuring the organization, is to ask us to do something for which we have repeatedly explained we are not qualified to do and to ask us to fix something we did not break.
To take the spirit of Taika Watiti this past week. We don’t want to be doing this. We don’t want to have to fix this mess. We want to be writing our silly little stories about our favorite little blorbos. But instead we have to be here, calling for the OTW to fix the mess that they created. And now, by saying ‘just go volunteer to change things from within’ you are demanding that we expose ourselves to abuse and toxicity to fix something we did not break. Fans of color did not set the current system up. We did not introduce racism into the OTWs organizational structure. Why would the only avenue for change that is acceptable be to put ourselves in harm’s way to do labor to fix something we did not cause in a space where we would be only 5 new voices within an existing entrenched organizational culture of nearly 1000 people? Where is the responsibility of the people who actually do have the power to fix things right now?
And for us to do this all for an organization that has demonstrated a repeated unwillingness to change? When we feel that the work we are doing here is just as important and valuable? Should we disappear silently into the organization so you - the passive user with the privilege to be using the site without being harmed - can continue using AO3, oblivious to the harms it is perpetuating so you can continue enjoying that privilege with a clear conscience?
Volunteering at this point seems, to us, the least effective way to actually push for change and the one that will cause us, as individuals, the most harm while doing nothing to actually change anything for anyone.
When the OTW has demonstrated actual concrete actions towards change, hired the people they have promised to hire, communicated transparently with their user base about the scale and content of the proposed changes, provided evidence of protections for volunteers from known past toxicity and clearly identified what kind of volunteers they need, in what capacity, and with specific skillsets, then sure, maybe some of us involved out here may feel motivated to jump in and work for that change. We don’t object to laboring to improve a space we love, we object to doing it fruitlessly.
However, all of the problems we have listed are characteristic of white supremacy culture in orgs: power hoarding, lack of transparency, defensiveness, believing there's only one right way, a culture of overwork, the idea that you as an individual could be responsible for the failure of the org because it is under constant threat.
In order for any of us to feel safe in actually participating within the organization, the OTW has to make the first step to improving itself by addressing their internal structural issues. It can be painful to bring these issues into the light, but it’s the only way for the OTW to move forward in a positive direction.
what makes me crazy about statements like “wouldn’t it make sense to channel some of this energy into volunteering with the OTW and implementing the changes being called for?” is that it presupposes that the people fighting for those changes haven’t tried that
Every now and again I think of this Sarah tweet and just stare into the middle distance.
