[artistformerlyknownasbutttrumpet]

i was training a young person at work, and she referred to sexual assault as "SA" out loud, and i immediately was like, "no, it's sexual assault, call it what it is," bc idgaf if the algorithm overlords have taught y'all that you should fear direct language, how tf do any of you expect to ever address real issues with any amount of seriousness if you can't even say the words? imagine an advocate looking a sexual assault survivor in the eyes and asking "did he grape you?" it's absolutely fucking absurd, but these young interns and new hires are coming into an environment where we deal with survivors of all different kinds of abuse, and they're coming with the mindset that the words are as bad as the actions, and that makes them shitty at the job and look juvenile af

i HATE self-censorship for a lot of reasons, but being in crisis work makes it even more frustrating. who are you censoring for? like i am being so fr, WHO are you censoring for? have you even thought it through? people who have been raped know that they have been raped. if someone attempts suicide or is grieving someone who did, saying "sewer slide" isn't going to protect them from any of the feelings. a murder victim's family isn't going to feel better bc you said "unalived" instead of murdered. if anything, it's just extremely invalidating and othering. it's saying "what happened to you is so bad that i won't even say the word," which is NOT trauma-informed care. you are not protecting survivors/victims when you self-censor. the ONLY things you protect when you self-censor are the puritanical ideologies that are being encouraged by rich fascists who want your money and obedience

say the fucking words, guys. just say the goddamn words before i go insane!!!

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Petition to the government against AI data centres:

We, the undersigned, citizens and residents of Canada, call upon the Government of Canada to:

1. Cease all incentives, subsidies, and permit accelerations for AI data centres;

2. Revoke permits and supports for AI data centre projects that have not been rigorously and transparently vetted by the local community;

3. Commission a detailed study for public release on negative externalities associated with existing AI data centres in Canada and elsewhere;

4. Require that all AI infrastructure projects be initiated and sought out by local communities, and be put through a transparent and democratic approval process; and

5. Subject AI products to genuine taxes as well as enforceable regulations around safety, transparency, and power and water use effectiveness.

[museeeuuuum]

CANADIANS SIGN SIGN SIGN

[draconym]

When I am king, we will valorize sanitation workers the way we currently valorize the military

[thegrindingwheel]

So heroic posters showing trashmen battling allegorical monsters? I'm down.

[draconym]

Yeah but that's just the beginning. I also want Sanitation Worker Discounts at every business and blockbuster movie propaganda glorifying sanitation work. I want random people to salute garbage collectors and thank them for their service. I want drivers who get impatient with the recycling truck and honk at it and swerve around it to become social pariahs

[tpwrtrmnky]

Analyzing the politics of a work that's meant to be apolitical is actually a really interesting exercise because it asks you to critically examine what the creator considers to be "political" in the first place. Which ideas are just How Things Are, and which ones are Political, and how is that influenced by the creator's beliefs?

[takashi0]

Usually this just ends up with you looking like a moron btw

[tpwrtrmnky]

Angrily lashing out at the suggestion that it's possible to do basic media analysis was foundational to the ragebait ecosystem of the 2010s, from which we got basically the entire culture of modern far right politics, btw.

[iteh3xael]

I genuinely believe myself and others are being so sincere and literal when we say TOUCH GRASS

[tpwrtrmnky]

I went outside and got an education, that's where I learned that you can obtain knowledge and insight through analytical methods, then noticed that some people who sit on the internet yelling at strangers get really mad about that constantly.

[pensivegladiola]

Don’t make me point to the Omar Sakar poem

[manuciruja]

[cjsnaake]

I fuck with this

[hypokeimena]

[image description: screenshot of writing formatted as a question and answer exchange. headline of piece is: The Proposal to Raise Every Boy as a Girl. (author not listed)

Q. You want to raise every boy as a girl? Yes.

Q. Why? A boy will learn to hate girls as long as he is raised in such a way where he is treated as better, and superior to, his girl peers, whenever he is cruel to girls. So, instead, we raise boys as girls.

Q. What if they say they are not a girl, and want to be acknowledged as boy? Then you know they are a boy, so you must make sure to understand them as boy, and not a girl.

Q. What does it mean to be 'raised as a girl'? That's up for you to decide. The only difference is that you should not raise boys any differently than you raise girls, since you raise every boy as a girl.

Q. Girls and boys are raised in specific ways for specific purposes, so it does not make sense to raise boys as girls. If you raise every boy as a girl, then there is no being which is not raised as a girl, so anyone raised as a girl necessarily must learn to do anything and everything to grow up, without restrictions on tasks, labours, or interests.

Q. But boys and girls are different. All two girls are different, and raising girls in one specific way destroys this individuality in favour of moulding girls to serve the same master. Still, the girls resist to live life on their own terms. If girls can be raised such that they know they can do anything they want, including not being girls, so too will boys raised as girls.

Q. Why not raise every girl as a boy? Because if a girl does not exist among boys, then the girl is made.

Q. Why not raise girls and boys as themselves? The self must be made in a world where girls and boys can first and foremost be themselves. One step towards this goal is to raise every boy as a girl.

Q. The way people raise girls is cruel, so why would you raise boys with that cruelty? If you raise girls with cruelty, then you should stop being cruel to girls.

/end description]

[domesticatedanimals]

The blog post this is screenshot is from

[raeraeraccoon]

Rocky ride Grace!

[frownyalfred]

Tips for writing those gala scenes, from someone who goes to them occasionally:

Generally you unbutton and re-button a suit coat when you sit down and stand up.

You’re supposed to hold wine or champagne glasses by the stem to avoid warming up the liquid inside. A character out of their depth might hold the glass around the sides instead.

When rich/important people forget your name and they’re drunk, they usually just tell you that they don’t remember or completely skip over any opportunity to use your name so they don’t look silly.

A good way to indicate you don’t want to shake someone’s hand at an event is to hold a drink in your right hand (and if you’re a woman, a purse in the other so you definitely can’t shift the glass to another hand and then shake)

Americans who still kiss cheeks as a welcome generally don’t press lips to cheeks, it’s more of a touch of cheek to cheek or even a hover (these days, mostly to avoid smudging a woman’s makeup)

The distinctions between dress codes (black tie, cocktail, etc) are very intricate but obvious to those who know how to look. If you wear a short skirt to a black tie event for example, people would clock that instantly even if the dress itself was very formal. Same thing goes for certain articles of men’s clothing.

Open bars / cash bars at events usually carry limited options. They’re meant to serve lots of people very quickly, so nobody is getting a cosmo or a Manhattan etc.

Members of the press generally aren’t allowed to freely circulate at nicer galas/events without a very good reason. When they do, they need to identify themselves before talking with someone.

[panakina]

As someone who spent over a decade catering luxury events, let me add some back of house info:

These events are almost always open bar. They're not trying to make their money back on alcohol. They want you to drink and eat and donate generously.

If there are cocktails, there will be at most two on offer, pre-made in large tubs. You cannot order a different version, it is what it is.

There are two types of events: cocktail style or seated. The first includes roaming hors d'oeuvres or a fancy buffet with tiny plates called a grazing station. For a long night, the roaming food will get a little bigger throughout the evening and have a 'main' at some point based around a protein.

A seated event will usually be more structured and may include multiple courses. Silver service is not in vogue anymore. You are likely to get either alternating meals brought to you like at a wedding, or served banquet style. A good caterer can get a plate to everyone in a 300 person event in about three minutes.

Drunk people are the same no matter how expensive their suits. They still laugh too loud, spill their drinks and slip on the dance floor. They are usually less embarrassed about doing coke in the bathrooms.

A full scale event that starts at 6pm will have staff arriving at noon to begin setup. Earlier if there's a light show or pyrotechnics. Typically venues don't just have 30 tables and three hundred chairs lying around, let alone table cloths, chair covers, etc. It's all rented and brought in on the day. Bands and DJs will be running audio tests in the background throughout.

Most heritage buildings that host these things, like museums and manor houses, aren't really designed for them. They might put down mats so you're not walking in stilettos over two hundred year old wooden floors, the kitchens are weirdly far away, and there are not enough taps. There is never anywhere for staff to sit, so if you open the wrong door you might find half a dozen waiters sitting on upturned milk crates in a room full of million dollar paintings, eating the left over bread.

Really old buildings don't have enough bathrooms, which means the staff will be sharing with the guests.

Clean up starts the second the event ends, if not sooner. Unattended glasses will start to disappear first, then table decorations. When the timer ticks over, the lights come back on and exhausted staff strip the tables, pack up dirty glasses and unopened wine bottles and have to Tetris it all into the back of a van. The venue is booked for that day only, so everything has to be gone before anyone can go home. A large event that finishes at midnight might take until 3am to be cleared away.

These are very long and physically demanding nights for anyone working them. The staff all get to know each other, and will absolutely notice someone trying to sneak in wearing a borrowed uniform. They are not being paid enough to care.

[chokedqwerty]

that au wehere ilyukhina and yao dont die and everyone is a bit more happymaybe? a bit sillier?

[deadpowol]

[naamahdarling]

I love the implication that, as Larry is an "unpaid trainee", the dog is paid.

[landsccape]

[ravioliet]

i literally love saying "ON IT BOSS!!!!!" whenever someone asks me to do something like i'm some sort of henchman. it doesn't matter if they're my boss or not for real even because in the moment they are, and whatever they requested of me i'm on it

[natalieironside]

Maybe this is a hot take but the gendered segregation of bloodsports is just as pants-on-head ridiculous as the gendered segregation of any other sport.

Like. This is a fucking game. Two boxers fighting one another in a ring are two gamers playing a game together. I cannot stress the extent to which boxing, MMA, et al are games created and pursued primarily for idle amusement. Just because the game is happening in a ring as opposed to on a pitch doesn't make it less of a game. We are Playing Toys when we glove up and clobber each other. It is For Fun. They're dangerous games, to be sure, but the danger is the chief source of amusement for the participants and the audience. The boxers wouldn't be boxing if they hated boxing.

"If we did co-ed boxing there would be Men Beating Up Women 😡" Last time I checked a fight requires at least 2 active participants unless you're just beating up on yourself alone like Edward Norton in that movie. And as I said above, I presume nobody would pursue a career in boxing if they didn't like doing the boxing.

And moreover, maybe I'm just a hashtag 90s kid but I grew up being constantly innundated with messages about how girls are just as tough as boys and can do anything boys can do. "Fight like a girl" was an inescapably popular slogan. And it was all very nice and heartwarming and inspirational. So I take serious umbrage with the notion that competing in a co-ed fight league equates to "men beating up women" because, here in the real world, the women would lay out the men just as often as the reverse, and this implicit assumption that women are by majority soft, delicate, helpless creatures simply unfit for participation in physical culture has got to be one of the least feminist things I've ever heard.

[coral-skeleton]

Fighting (and weightlifting) would be some of the easiest sports to convert into a co-ed model cause they already have weight classes within the gender segregated versions to keep the sports fair. It really wouldn't be that hard to just combine the two halves into one thing. And this is also what prevents the thing that everyone is so scared of happening from happening. You wouldn't get a massive mountain of a man beating up a tiny woman in co-ed boxing, because they'd be in two different weight classes. If the massive mountain of a man were to fight a woman, he'd be fighting a massive mountain of a woman, and if a the tiny woman were to fight a man, she'd be fighting a tiny man. Thats how these sports already work. (This is also why the argument against letting trans people compete in the gendered categories matching their identities falls flat, people think if you let a trans woman compete in womens boxing that she'd dominate all her opponents, when in reality she'd be in the weight category that ensures her opponents give her fair fights. But that's a different conversation)

The real reason most sports, including fighting, are gender segregated, isn't because men would automatically dominate, quite the opposite actually, it's because the men would not win every single time and would lose to women more often than one would assume. And because our patriarchal society devalues anything women are good at, sports as a whole would be devalued. And that devaluing of womens work, talents, interests, and accomplishments is the real problem that needs to be addressed

[writers-solace]

I don't think Tolkien is a good fantasy writer because he scored the highest at some objective Best Fantasy Book Test that every fantasy writer has to take, I think he's a good fantasy writer because he created a world based on things that he was interested in. I feel like a lot of fantasy writers think that they need to create a whole language for their world because Tolkien did and obviously his books are the best so they have to emulate him, but Tolkien did that because he was a linguistics nerd. I think the lesson to be learned from him is not that you have to include elves and deep history and new languages, but that you have to write endlessly about the things you are a huge nerd about and use those things to create your fantasy world

[bobdylanyume]

women around the world heed my call. your comfort above everything. dont put on those shoes that hurt after walking in them for 30 minutes dont wake up 1 hour and a half earlier to put on make up or do your hair dont tolerate a man talking down to you dont follow trends you dont care for dont let yourself feel hungry dont go places or do things to please someone else and most importantly. try that hobby or class or job that you think you will fail at.

[collarado]

original post

[aroace-ryland-grace]

eva stratt you are the most interesting character in all of fiction ever eva stratt they could never make me hate you

[aroace-ryland-grace]

I'm really really normal about eva stratt. if you couldn't tell

[yujateaandpi]

Shoutout to all the educators who inspire us to love the world even more.