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Welcome to Here

@we-are-temporary

Please have a time if you'd like and don't forget to- Alfie, 23, any pronouns

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!

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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.

Between Ryan Gosling Ken and Benoit Blanc I'm starting to think that it's some sort of animal abuse to keep casting big name actors in stoic macho manly man rolls instead of giving them goofy little guys to play. Like look at them their coats are shiny, they seem so much more lively and energetic. We need to make sure all actors have enough goofy little guys to play before peta gets involved.

every moment of every day i am thinking about this tiktok

Lumpfish come in a variety of shapes and colors.

[He scoops up the fish, it spits water and he turns it toward the camera]

This one is stumpy and green. Very beautiful, very powerful.

[He picks up another fish and turns it toward the camera]

This is what a normal lumpfish looks like. It is more elongated, but still a vibrant blue color. Very beautiful, very powerful.

[He picks up another fish and turns it toward the camera]

This is one of the stumpiest ones we have. Its hump is very high. It is very stumpy, but yet very beautiful, and very powerful.

[He pans over a lot of fish, all looking up at the camera]

My fish army is ever growing, and soon I will over throw the world. Very beautiful, very powerful.

because of this tiktok, i frequently murmur "very beautiful, very powerful" at myself, and i cannot recommend it enough.

The first prototype of this winter's CRAB FACTS advent calendar IS READY BABYYYYY!!! These scratch-off calendars give you a crab fact a day for all of advent. Or whenever the hell YOU want crab facts. Maybe you need crabs in October, who even knows.

It looks SO good thanks to @franzanth. It's a cloudy day and the pic isn't giving the colors justice. They're so bright and amazing.

These support Skype a Scientist, a program that connects people with science through personal connections and art!

Big fan of the new Obvious Plant for obvious (plant) reasons

[ID: An Obvious Plant branded toy package in pink, orange and white with a realistic plastic prawn in the blister pack. Text reads "Fuck it, let's PRAY TO THE PRAWN GOD. Benevolent! No church! Visibly patrols the sky in exchange for small fish and invertebrates! Bad stuff continues to happen, maybe try worship the Prawn instead? WARNING: VENGEFUL. do not cross the prawn" end ID]
[ID: The reverse of the package, with a prawn drawing at the bottom. Text reads "THE 8 TENETS OF PRAWN GOD. 1. Nature is sacred. 2. Do no harm. 3. Ingest of the BRINE. 4. Cleanliness is prawnliness. 5. Greed corrupts. 7. The number [REDACTED] is forbidden. 8. Devoutness shall be rewarded with: (1) A RIDE ON THE PRAWN. This prawnduct is not real. Nothing is real." End ID]
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Ice delivery man in Houston, TX circa 1920 Check this blog!

why did he eat this 

Historian finishing a dissertation on the ice industry here. For once, I am not here to take away your joy!  “Oh no, the ice man is too sexy and he’s going to fuck my wife while I’m not home” was a legit moral panic for DECADES. So much so that if you were fancy, you could get an icebox built into your wall so the dirty, sexy ice man didn’t have to come inside your house with your delicate, impressionable wife.  This pic is going in the diss if I can chase down the correct citation for it.

I just want to remind everyone how affordable buying food from indigenous tribes is. I live in a major city and I was able to purchase and ship (15) pounds of fish from back home to myself for cheaper than I could buy it from a grocery store here in the city. Yeah, shipping has its own environmental factors but I was able to support an indigenous owned business while also getting my groceries at a lesser cost. (Buying in bulk is always a good idea if you’re planning on having something shipped to you)

Some tribal owned grocers that ship:

Tanka Bars (Oglala)

Twisted Cedar Wine (Cedar Paiutes)

Seka Hills Olive Oil and Vinegars (Yocha Dehe Wintun)

Honor the Earth (? Anishinaabe)

Nett Lake Wild Rice (Boise Forte Anishinaabe)

Passamaquoddy maple (Passamaquoddy)

BONUS: coffee :)

Yeego Coffee (Navajo)

Spirit Mountain Roasting (Yuma Quechan)

Birchbark Coffee (Anishinaabe)

"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.

Tough Guise came out before the turn of the millennium for fuck sakes! 

This used to be settled feminist theory! I studied it in uni! It wasn’t controversial!

This rad fem bullshit has set us back decades....

Discussing the whole "always evil species" thing I'm genuinely annoyed by how much more sense D&D lore makes if elves turn good when they're above ground and evil when they're below ground.

Your elf buddy goes down to get something from the basement and immediately starts cackling and kicking your stuff. "Dammit Bob!" you say, trying to get him up the stairs so he turns good again.

Anyway my personal headcanon after the discussion is that, as elves are beings of nature, each subspecies governs a different aspect of nature. Wood Elves are tasked with protecting the beautiful parts of nature, the flowers and the deer, while the Drow are charged with protecting the repellent parts, the scavengers and the vermin. They're not evil- cockroaches are just as important to the ecosystem as butterflies, and the majestic lion is far more dangerous then any venomous scuttling thing. But alas, it's easy to assume about the figure who speaks for the spiders and the mould.

High Elves, for their part, are tasked with guiding domesticated nature, protecting nature as it intertwines with civilization, which is why they live in cities and work to interact with the other species.

I like the tonal dissonance between my two posts here. Follow me for the ol' shitpost/worldbuilding one-two.

The subterranean aspects of the ecosystem are under-appreciated