Faerie Tales and Slimy Snails

Lazy fanfic author and reader. Firmly in love with all things nerdy and cooool.

[politijohn]

Source

This should never have been a thing

[mysharona1987]

[mysharona1987]

But this is genuinely a shitty act against humanity.

[natnormalatall]

roald dahl was antisemitic. george orwell was openly homophobic. edgar allan poe married his 13 year old cousin. dr seuss cheated on his wife. hp lovecraft was racist as fuck. anyways they’re fucking dead it’s not like you’re enabling their behaviors in the afterlife or something. then again I think orwell’s homophobia bleeds into one of his books so uh keep an eye out for that

the difference between these old white guys and jk rowling is that the former group is all dead. jk rowling is alive and using your money to oppress trans people

[teaboot]

I was debating pre- and post- smartphone existentialism with an older gentleman today and he stopped part way through and said “Why are you a security guard? Why aren’t you teaching this at some college somewhere?” And I didn’t know what to say so I went with “Well I used to make art but nobody pays an artist”

[teaboot]

I want to invoke thought and wonder and introspection and encourage the passions of every soul I meet forever and ever and dig until I find the glorious potential for creation and experience and joy in every single one but unfortunately I must pay rent and so I stand, a meat shield, an NPC with unlockable dialogue

[oojamaflip-whatchamacallit]

#capitalism brain tells you that anyone interesting must fight to the top of their interest#and precludes the possibility of everyone everyone everyone already being interesting

[charlesoberonn]

[clouds-of-wings]

There's also the additional aspect that if luxuries are what's expensive, you can choose to go without and then you don't have to make so much money. You can choose to work part-time, or seasonally, or one person can provide for a group, if living is cheap and you don't need luxury. But if being alive is expensive, you have no choice but to work a lot, regardless of how frugal your lifestyle is. And then you may as well buy yourself the latest gadget to cheer yourself up after another annoying week at work, because it costs barely anything anyway.

[sassinake]

Exactly this. Basic necessities are priced like luxuries.

Everything else is just sugar water.

[commandersheena]

In one of my film classes last semester we had to tell a story in 3 pictures for a mini assignment so my friend and I did this

[drizzit]

Happy 10 year anniversary to this post!

[tzikeh]

Maryland to Become First US State to Ban Surveillance Pricing That Charges More After Mining Personal Data

Maryland will become the first US state to ban surveillance pricing in retail stores, after passing Protection from Predatory Pricing Act.

Jesus fucking christ that this exists in the first place

[boyslit]

I WAS FUCKING WONDERING WHAT THOSE DIGITAL PRICE TAGS WERE ABOUT SUDDENLY i had hoped they were so the workers didn't have to finagle those little papers into the slider part anymore 😭

[eclipticasolaris]

Hi, yes, that is the OFFICIAL excuse made to me by the guy replacing the paper tags with digital ones at my local Walmart, but the end goal is to remove the numbers off the shelf entirely, replacing them with QR codes that you have to scan with the app…. Which requires your login information….. and also stores your card information so even if you didn’t use your Walmart account at the physical checkout, if you used a card they recognize, they assign that purchase to your Walmart account purchase history.

I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.

Sure. That’s how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:

Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.

No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.

So here’s what we’re gonna do gang:

Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:

Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.

Express that you didn’t actually want it, you just couldn’t see on the shelf how much it was.

POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.

When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you don’t want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)

If it’s a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If it’s a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.

In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.

Yes, call your reps. Yes, push for more legislation like this in more places. But also take an extra minute out of your shopping trip to MAKE IT HURT for companies to pull this shit.

[antisocialxconstruct]

I've seen some people in the notes express (very fair) concern that this is only going to inconvenience already under-paid laborers, and not have any impact on corporate. While I can't speak for every company or every store, I do work in a grocery store and I can tell you this is precisely the kind of thing that would have an impact, especially if people are doing it en masse. Stores absolutely track their shrink numbers, and they do draw distinctions between what gets stolen, damaged, or wasted for other reasons. If people are making it clear that the reason they're bringing things to the cashier is that the prices are not adequately represented on the displays, and rather than improving business it's wasting product, slowing down transactions, and causing confusion and mistrust in customers, that is a language that shareholders speak.

[dovewithscales]

I worked in retail for years. If this had happened while I was working retail, I would have been delighted and felt great solidarity with anyone who was wasting my employer's time and money and giving me busy work as an act of protest. In point of fact every moment the employee spends carting items back to the shelves is a moment not spent standing at a register.

[astriiformes]

The polar opposite of corporate accounts trying to come across as hip and super friendly are the ones for libraries, aquariums, parks systems and the like, that are basically just trying to get people excited about learning and the wonder of history/science by posting things like this:

[mangopatch]

[demonladytakkuri]

You know how much I would lose my mind if I was at an aquarium and turned a corner to see a wild ass heron staring at a fish tank

[mousegirlheart]

um actually there's nothing wrong with letting cats be outdoor pets. your cat is depressed locked inside forever. it's animal abuse. let it outside. more cats should be let outside more often. especially overnight.

[morbidology]

A tiger bursting to freedom after being rescued from a poacher’s snare in the Russian Far East.

[asordidbarwere]

[3000s]

if you're not 26 years old right now you will be soon

[tromboneralert]

But I just turned 30.....please......dont make me go back there......

[3000s]

i'm sorry there's nothing we can do about it

[writingdose]

I am once again begging people to realize that AI checker doesn’t work. it’s never worked. it’s notoriously known to have flagged human-made works as AI and AI-generated works as human-made. and by feeding it people’s works, you are feeding more works to AI, because apparently the machine itself is AI.

the only thing AI checker does is harm genuine artists and people in general too.

[estrogenesis-eeveeangelion]

well maybe you should blearily wake up at 5:08 in the pre-dawn light and find the sleeping soft tiny mammal body of your cat just inches from your head like a miracle too beautiful for speech, and you should rustle one hand out from your blankets to rub fingertip circles across the warm eggshell dome of her little velvet-wrapped skull and on the bristly patches just where the cups of her ears begin, and as she inclines her head into your fingers and purrs without ever opening her little eyes you should feel a love so tender that you understand how that love could have reached out from the fireside into the inky spangled nights long gone to reach her, and then you'll feel better

[estrogenesis-eeveeangelion]

i am at a complete loss as to how to adequately express to you how much this cat throws up yeah

[can-i-make-image-descriptions]

[Image ID: Tumblr tag from hotTubSharts reading: and then maybe she'll wake you again at 6 to the sound of her puking on the floor. maybe /End ID]

[starofhisheart]

Happy pride to those 5 seconds where Charlie Swan thought Jacob was coming out to him in the most insane way possible

[lizclimo]

[persianmom-deactivated20260602]

people telling chatgpt their problems is insane to me like girl just get a tumblr….

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

On fun thing about everyone using ai to do their data analysis or write articles or whatever is it's really exposing how many people weren't doing their jobs this whole time.

"We just found out that the ai tool we've been using to make business decisions for 3 months has been hallucinating all the sales data!" okay well it was stupid to use ai for this, why didn't you learn how glitchy it was before implementing it, but far more importantly, what you've just told me is that nobody bothered to check the real numbers for 3 months. "This guy has been using ai to write 9 magazine articles for us and the quoted info was all fake, he has been fired" no editor checked the first eight? "I used ai to write this report and the math was wrong" you didn't check the math? In your own report? Everyone is just telling on themselves re: how their work was always wildly unreliable and they already weren't doing their jobs.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Awhile back I was looking at some marketing nonsense about some company trying to create, like, virtual versions of workers that could help with their jobs, and obviously the actual target was employers (who they wanted to convince that they could replace all their workers with bots and save on salaries) but they were pretending to market it to the workers themselves, and their whole pitch was like "imagine if this digital version of you went to all your meetings and stuff while you hung out at the beach, and emailed you a meeting summary later".

And I was just like. Meetings where a bunch of people send their AIs to meet and then send them summaries? If no people need to be at the meeting, why is there a fucking meeting? This is Email With Extra Steps. If all that's happening in the meeting is people reporting a bit of information, that can just be a report. All this does is admit that you don't actually need the meetings. You don't need to have robot-only meetings you can just cancel the whole thing.

Students writing papers with AI that teachers then read and grade with AI while media sharing platforms are full of ai slop made so that other ais will watch the slop and inflate viewer numbers. While people send ais to meetings to summarise information given by other people's ais at the meetings. People prompting ai to write messages to their friends which are summarised by a different ai and the friend tells ai to write a message back to be ai summarised again. I saw a reddit post the other day about a guy who couldn't figure out why his bride stormed out of their wedding while he was reading her ai-generated wedding vows. Inaccurate ai-generated shit slips into publication because the editors already weren't checking (assuming the writers were) and now the writers aren't checking (assuming the editor will). It's fascinating to see just how much people are already just nor participating and now they're finding easier ways to not participate. You don't have to get married. The boss doesn't have to schedule these meetings. Every time someone is like "ai fucked this thing up" I'm like. Sounds like you were already not invested in doing it.