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YOU ARE THE REASON
Jules of Nature
Peter Solarz
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One Nice Bug Per Day
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DEAR READER
trying on a metaphor
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Kaledo Art
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JBB: An Artblog!
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Claire Keane
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Sade Olutola
AnasAbdin
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@brasskingfisher
That is why no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party... ...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
I agree with Nye
If you really want to be an ally to Queer people this pride month (or even just make the world a better place)?
Then here's one simple trick.....
STOP CARING ABOUT SEX!!!!
I mean this not in the way of 'not everyone feels the same way, so be respectful.' I mean it in the way of treating sex as 'a thing that happens' and which is a morally and ethically neutral act (when it happens between consenting adults). Rather than 'something which is amazing and special and hugely important, but only in *these exact circumstances*, otherwise it's horrible and disgusting and yucky and shameful and you're going to suffer because of it!'. Is going to help improve society.
Not only is it going to help queer people (especially aspecs) feel a lot more comfortable and safer with their identities, it's also going to help deal with transphobia and the casual misogyny which we're seeing from all sides of society.
Today's midafternoon thought is:
Brain is no happy = me no workee well.
FML: higher education edition....
So, I've spent most of the last fortnight dealing with the anxiety of potentially being ghosted for a funded PhD (and the accompanying despair of if I end up back in the position of having recruiters ghost me on the reg) and just this morning realised potentially why.
Yasee, my research proposal was to look at how racial and national identity affected the personal experiences of British and non British seafarers within a specific collection of oral histories. Now, I've realised that this might have been interpreted as that I'm some kind of red hat wearing, knuckledragging, Trump loving Fhuragist looking for academic "evidence" of 'anti-white racism' to further my agenda (especially since I mention how the issues of race and immigration have come to dominate contemporary politics and the collection is from predominantly white people).
Which is opposed to what I actually want to do, which is examine diversity within a population historically and challenge the overly simplistic idea that racial equality is some kind of radically new idea that got invented in the 1970s and explore the nuances of historical attitudes towards social diversity.
alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.
we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)
please rb for larger sample size!
Question 1/3
What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?
under 18, AI is a net positive
under 18, AI is a net negative
18-29, AI is a net positive
18-29, AI is a net negative
30-45, AI is a net positive
30-45, AI is a net negative
46-60, AI is a net positive
46-60, AI is a net negative
over 60, AI is a net postive
over 60, AI is a net negative
Question 2/3
How often do you visit or interact with museums/archives (whether in person or online)?
Frequently (multiple times per month)
Often (multiple times per year)
Occasionally (a couple times per year)
Rarely (once every couple of years)
Never :(
Question 3/3
If you saw a museum was using AI in exhibits, marketing, research, etc., would you be more or less inclined to visit that museum?
under 18, more inclined
under 18, less inclined
18-29, more inclined
18-29, less inclined
30-45, more inclined
30-45, less inclined
46-60, more inclined
46-60, less inclined
over 60, more inclined
over 60, less inclined
Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!
🫶
Hey op are you telling your boss your sample source? Like guts of steel, if so.
For the benefit of anyone having to deal with queerphobic and or unsupportive family members this pride month:
Congratulations, I'm your family now!
Stay hydrated, eat your veggies, support yourself and remember; I'm proud of you.
Just in case someone needed to hear it
Learning this was an intentional genocide changed me.
I know most of those following me know this, but just to make it super clear. An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger/the Great Famine) was a deliberate genocide of the Irish people. There was enough food grown in Ireland to make sure everyone was alive and healthy and survived. Instead it was exported, sent to England and elsewhere for profit while men, women, and children starved in the streets. While the English landlords fucked off and evicted starving families who couldn’t afford rent. While babies were too weak to cry and died at the side of the road.
They tried to kill us, but they did not succeed. And we owe so much thanks to the other oppressed peoples, in particular the Choctaw Nation and the Masai, who sent money and grain to us.
Let me repeat that. The Choctaw Nation who had just gone through the Trail of Tears sent us money to try save Irish lives. It’s led to an understanding between Irish people and Native American tribes, most recently when we donated to the Navajo and Hopi fundraisers for COVID-19 relief, because while it may be a different tribe, Irish people will never forget those who helped us and we’ll help back.
The entire population of the island is less than seven million people. We’re still a million less on this island than pre famine. And it’s not that long ago. My grandmother’s grandparents lived through it. We’ve told the stories, it literally changed the DNA of the country. We have a national fear of renting, because so many people were evicted. People joke about Irish people always offering loads of food, but it’s because there’s that cultural memory of not being able to.
They tried to kill us, but they did not succeed. We will not let them take our lives, we will not let them take our language. We lost so much, but we will not lose it all.
This is why I get so angry when people say “it was the potato famine, it was because of monoculture/microbes.”
Nope. The potatoes were the only thing Irish people were allowed to fucking eat, because as pointed out, the rest of the crops they were growing were for their landlords to ship to England. So when the one “worthless” crop they were allowed to eat rotted in the field, the English crown, empire, landlords, all shrugged and carried on. People starved to death lying next to productive fields.
Ok, so IF (and I feel I should stress the *IF*) An Gorta Mór WAS a deliberate genocide (or engineered in some way shape or form) then WHY with just over 100 years of independence and 170ish years of innovation in medicine and farming practices, plus mechanisation (all of which allows more people to survive various diseases, and generally live longer, and enjoy a more diverse diet, supported by fewer people), has the population STILL NOT recovered to pre famine levels?
Unless of course, the argument of deliberate starvation is based in nationalist rhetoric, and the actual situation was far more complicated and down more due to the distribution of land in Ireland and political attitudes towards poverty than any kind of discrimination and social engineering.
HASO: The Human adoption agency
Ok, so I've seen a few HASO posts about humans being like cats (as in 'looks like you have a human now') and or exotic pets/ wildlife in captivity (like that post about an alien version of Steve Irwin) and surely there's scope for a business which operates like a mix between an employment agency and a matchmaking service pairing up unemployed/stranded/wanderlust filled humans who want to get out there with aliens who want/need a human(s) (say they want to run a student exchange or similar, or there's stuff a humans are more suited for than other species in a particular section of space, or having a human crewmember is seen as a status symbol).
There's bound to be a market for something like this (and probably enough weirdos here there to create a script for a 'sponsor a human' charity advert).
@marlynnofmany you interested in incorporating this idea into your work?
A human adoption agency sounds adorable. It reminds me of the "humans are pixies/Borrowers" idea too, with the really big aliens who keep finding things fixed and/or stolen on their spaceships. Some enterprising individual could set up a matchmaking service on a busy space station to match up tech-inclined humans with ships that need tiny hands to help with the repairs, and whimsical artsy humans with ships that would appreciate murals appearing on the walls overnight, etc etc.
This could easily be played up like humans are these exotic, mystical things, like fantasyland familiars, who will come to you if you're particularly deserving. And like the fae, they can turn on you if you're cruel.
Dang, now I want to write about some preteen alien who befriends the magical creature living in the cargo hold, and has adventures with them. A human with a jetpack and unfamiliar tech is basically a sci-fi fairy, right?
Actually the humans are space fae angle isn't what I was thinking. BUT, I could see it working, if other space faring races are much bigger and we become like those ferrets who are used to run wires through ducting, or even pest control like cats/ terriers? And the aliens keep humans around (or maybe specifically hire humans) because we can get places they can't and it's considered 'more natural' to have them killed by humans than through poison. 'Oh you've got space vermin? You need to get yourself a human! They'll sort it out in no time.'
But also, a weird idea is the reverse. What if humans end up in a Gulliver in Lulliputia situation and we're much bigger than the aliens? Would they start looking to ship humans in to replace machinery/animal power for infrastructure projects?
Like why would you hire a team of labourers to dig a canal off you can get 1 human to do it more or less instantly? Or build a crane/scaffolding for a skyscraper when a you could get a human to lift everyone and everything you need to whatever level is being worked on?
HASO: The Human adoption agency
Ok, so I've seen a few HASO posts about humans being like cats (as in 'looks like you have a human now') and or exotic pets/ wildlife in captivity (like that post about an alien version of Steve Irwin) and surely there's scope for a business which operates like a mix between an employment agency and a matchmaking service pairing up unemployed/stranded/wanderlust filled humans who want to get out there with aliens who want/need a human(s) (say they want to run a student exchange or similar, or there's stuff a humans are more suited for than other species in a particular section of space, or having a human crewmember is seen as a status symbol).
There's bound to be a market for something like this (and probably enough weirdos here there to create a script for a 'sponsor a human' charity advert).
@marlynnofmany you interested in incorporating this idea into your work?
the change from AD to CE feels really emblematic of how surface-level and meaningless the supposed secularization of the western world is
Common Era is definitely preferable over Anno Domini, if only because christ is no lord of mine, but it’s only less christianocentric in that it doesn’t overtly make reference to christ in its title. the benchmark is still the same. you’re still measuring when the common era began using the (supposed) birth of christ, separating history into “the period before jesus” and “the period after jesus”. this conception of history is no less defined by christianity than it was before, except that now it’s easier to ignore because you’ve draped it in a “secular”, “modern” veneer and done nothing to actually unpack the ways in which western society intrinsically centers christianity.
I think about this a lot, and it bothers me too.
I wish we could get archeologists together and agree on a date to put as the start date of the neolithic revolution and make that year 1. (not that it has a definitive start date. But it did start everywhere around the same time, roughly 10,000 to 8,000 years ago. So we could pick, like , a mean date.)
Well, there is a completely secular dating system which is sometimes used in archeology: BP Before Present (where in the present is 1st January 1950).
The reason it's not more commonly used is partly the mental adjustment needed, but also the last reliable C14 date is kinda a pointless benchmark when you're not using carbon dating.
Besides, the BCE/CE may be arbitrary, but it's been used as a sharded standard system across multiple different cultures and societies for several centuries and is no less arbitrary than any other of the other dating systems used (commonly the accession of the present ruler or specific cosmological event).
So, I went to give blood yesterday and had a new experience. The person I was dealing with (I'm not sure about the right term, phlebotomist maybe?) pointed out that they'd be adding a special blue tag to my donation and asked me if I knew why....
Now, I'd never actually seen the tag before, or even had it pointed out to me, but I knew (because of following NHSBT on social media) that it was a way of saying that my blood was suitable for use in neonatal transfusions, and honestly that makes me feel weirdly good about myself. Just to know that maybe, there's soon to be some sick newborn baby out there who'll still alive, just because I took a hour out of my day for a chocolate biscuit and some squash.
You know I’m still open to the possibility of leaving the US at some point in my life and there’s a lot of places that I’d probably enjoy a lot more but almost every country in the world these days has major economic issues.
Like you look more in depth into a country you’re thinking about moving to at some point and all the articles about it are like “OUR YOUNG PEOPLE ARE DEPRESSED AND POOR AND EVERYBODY IS RACIST WHERE DID WE GO WRONG NOBODY CAN AFFORD TO RENT A STUDIO APARTMENT AAAAHHHHHHH WE ARE FALLING BEHIND THE REST OF THE WORLD”
So anyways I’m starting to think that there’s a reason that humans do so many drugs in general.
Yeah, blame 80 years of USian propaganda and attempted forced compliance with their socioeconomic philosophy (with nearly half of that offering no real alternative) of "YOU WILL embrace OUR BRAND of capitalism and consumerism OR ELSE!!!"
Where the "OR ELSE!!!" ranges from an economic blockade that cripples your economy (by removing or severely limiting your ability to trade internationally) through overthrow of your government to outright invasion and occupation.
More sad news from TERF island
Updated code of practice covering England, Wales and Scotland also relates to changing rooms and follows supreme court ruling
So, whilst this does massively suck for trans folks, in practice, this guidance means that in order to comply with the equalities act and avoid being fined for discrimination, there has to be a gender neutral space provided for trans people who don't want to out themselves. And in something of an own goal for the FARTS behind this, the most practical way to comply with that for most of the UK is to eradicate gender segregated facilities.
I may well be struggling with my own executive dysfunction, but I swear I will happily help organise whoever and whatever needs to get their shit in a pile in order to kill the spray-tanned shitstain and or end capitalism
i find it interesting how people will shout "death before detransition" and then immediately say thats not what it means when one points out thats what jeanne darc chose
was inspired by this ask to make these
something something the irony of it being hard to find a depiction of jeanne being burned to death in men's clothing despite it literally being the law used to justify murdering her and the thing she explicitly refused to stop doing even if it killed her. the way the crossdressing saint isn't allowed to be depicted as anything but a beautiful pale-skinned feminine woman with long flowing hair. yet when she refused to stop wearing men's clothing she was compared to a dog returning to its own vomit.
Hate to piss on your bonfire, but the reason you probably found it difficult to find the image you mentioned was probably because that was very much NOT what she was executed for (unless my limited knowledge of medieval theology is missing when and where the church declared cross dressing heretical).
She was executed for heresy (hence why she was burned) because of her lack of knowledge about specific points of theology. Admittedly not wearing men's clothes was a condition of her "probation" (for want of a better term) following her 1st trial and recanting of her claims of divine visions (the validity of which is why she's tried again), but it's debated as to why she wore men's clothes in the first place.
Certainly there's an argument for it being because of her gender identity (which is somewhat undermined by her initial refusal to wear the men's clothes provided for her in the specific instance that was the justification for her 2nd trial) but there's also arguments for practicality and safety (in that this is a teenage girl travelling long distances often in limited company through a warzone with at least 3 armies (all of whom are abusing civilians) and all the dangers that presents).
wait, Derin how did your leaving make the hospital shut down?
I used to work as a live-in nanny for a pediatrician.
Now, the thing about hospitals in my country is that they are massively understaffed and massively underfunded. This is especially true outside the major cities. The staff are worked to the bone and receive little to no help in things like finding accommodation or childcare, making working in rural areas a very uninviting prospect; staff come out here, get lumped with the work of three people (because there's nobody else to do it), burn out under the workload and leave, meaning that those remaining have even more work because that person is gone. It's unsustainable and the medical staff are doing their best to sustain it, because people die if they don't, so to the higher-ups it looks like everything's getting done and therefore everything is fine.
My friend (and boss) worked one week on, one week off, swapping out with another pediatrician. This was necessary because it would not be physically possible for one person to handle the workload for longer periods of time. The one single pediatrician had to hold up the entire pediatrics ward, which was not only the only public hospital pediatrics ward in our town, but also the one that served all the towns around us for a few hours' drive in all directions. I regularly saw her go to work sick, aching, tired, or with a debilitating 'I can barely make words or see' level migraine, because if she took a day off, twenty children didn't get healthcare that day, and some of these kids' appointments were scheduled weeks in advance. She'd work long hours in the day and then be called in a couple of times overnight for an hour or two at a time (she was on-call at night too, because somebody had to be), and then go in the next day. Sometimes she would be forced to take a day off because she physically could not stay awake for longer than a few minutes at a time, meaning she couldn't drive to work.
Cue my niece's second birthday coming up in Melbourne. I'd been working for her for about 3 years, and she (and the hospital) had plenty of advance warning that I (and therefore she) needed one (1) Friday off. That's fine, we'll find someone to work that Friday, the hospital said. Right up until the last week where they're like "oh, we can't find a replacement; you can come in, can't you?"
No, she tells them; I don't have anyone to watch my kid that day.
Oh, surely you can hire a babysitter for this one day, they say. Think of the children! We really really need you to work that day. I know we said it'd be fine but we need you now, there's no one else to do it.
There are no other babysitters, she told them. Unless you can find one?
That's not our responsibility, they said.
But I'm not changing my plans, she's got plans by now as well, the hospital knew about this one day weeks in advance, and with absolutely no reserve staff they're forced to reschedule all pediatrics appointments for that Friday. Not a huge deal, it happens on the 'physically too overworked to get out of bed' days too. I go to Melbourne, she goes back to her home in Adelaide for her recovery week, all should be on track.
My niece gives me Covid.
This was way back in the first wave of the pandemic, and there were no Covid vaccines yet. The rules were isolate, mask up, hope. I had Covid in the house, and it would've been madness for my friend and her toddler to come back into the Covid house instead of staying in Adelaide. There was absolutely no way that a pediatrician could live with someone in quarantine due to Covid and go to work in the hospital with sick children every day. And no support existed for finding another babysitter, or temporary accommodation, so the hospital was down a pediatrician.
The other pediatrician wasn't available to do a three-week stint. They were also trapped in Adelaide on their well-earned week off.
Meaning that the only major pediatrics ward within a several-hour radius had no pediatricians. They had to shut down and send all urgent cases to Adelaide for the week. To the complete absence of surprise of any of the doctors or nurses; of course this would happen, this was bound to happen, it presumably keeps happening. But probably to the surprise of the higher-ups. After all, the hospital was doing fine, right? Of course all the staff were complaining of overwork and a lack of resources in every meeting, but they could always be fobbed off with the promise of more help sometime in the future; the work was mostly getting done, so the issue couldn't be too urgent.
It's not like some nanny who doesn't even work for the hospital could go out of town for a weekend for the first time in three years, and get the only public pediatrics ward in the area shut down for a week.
This saga does also illustrate something I learned about in library school, which is: when management starts reducing your staffing (or other resources) to the point that it jeopardizes your ability to function, make visible cuts.
Don't stretch yourselves to the breaking point to keep doing as much as possible, and don't cut corners where customers/clients/patients/patrons won't notice. Say out loud, "Due to low funding/staffing, we can no longer do X," where X is something visible but not mission-critical.
In the library world, this is usually a small reduction in hours: we lose an employee position, we stop being open on Sundays, or we close an hour earlier every day. (And we put up signs saying exactly why, and to whom patrons can complain.)
If you say "this isn't enough resources/we're understaffed/we can't go on like this," but then you continue to go on like this? You've just proved that you can indeed go on like this.
Of course, not everyone is in a position where you can make decisions like this--reducing hours, or suspending a particular service; the reason we learn this in library school is that we usually have a clear bright line between operational management and funding. However, you can still ask. Management says, "For now this store is going to have to get by with 6 employees instead of 7," you say, "Okay; what are we going to stop doing, to make that work?"
And if the answer is, "Nothing," you just...let the problems happen. Someone gets sick, and they really need you to come on your day off? Sorry, but you made plans that you can't break (even if those plans are "lay in bed and eat ice cream"). But they can't open the store if you don't come in? Sounds like the store isn't going to be open. Hopefully we'll be able to get up to full staffing before this problem comes up again!
In the story above, the COVID quarantine situation was, of course, unpredictable, but if management had taken the lesson any of the times when appointments had to be cancelled because a doctor called off due to physical exhaustion, perhaps they would have had some options when both of their pediatricians were unavailable due to a global health emergency; who can say?
It can feel like sort of a dick move--to your immediate boss, your coworkers, your patrons/customers/clients/patients/whoever--to say no when it isn't technically absolutely impossible to say yes. But the doctor and the nanny in this story were both right to stick to their guns about this one well-planned and anticipated day off, and the rest was just a cascade of failure that ultimately stems from the decision to intentionally understaff the hospital, and to ignore warning signs of an impending staffing crisis.
And remember, "we can't find people to hire" almost always means "we're not offering a high enough paycheck".
This is something I keep seeing happening and have seen happen repeatedly for over a decade at this point in my life.
And honestly, it's one of the worst impacts of late stage capitalism (what with the prioritisation of profit/shareholder dividends over all else) and corporateisation of stuff. It has also led to me butting heads with management previously. If anyone ends up in a management/leadership position (for any kind of project), you never make your plan with *just enough* whatever to do it. You need to make sure you build some degree of slack into your plans to accommodate anything you don't/ can't foresee otherwise it all falls apart, and if you're not allowed that slack, make sure whoever denied you it carries the can (even if it is just having a record of you saying 'there is no wiggle room in this plan. Either it works perfectly, or it doesn't.')
The people who insist AI is smarter than a human are doing their fucking damnedest to manifest that
When you consider the fact that some of these people vote, the fact that Trump got reelected suddenly isn't that surprising any more.
