The big thing on facebook this month is people think lone star ticks and alpha gal syndrome are not only brand new but were engineered by bill gates along with screwworm flies to make people vegan.

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@fuzzynecromancer
The big thing on facebook this month is people think lone star ticks and alpha gal syndrome are not only brand new but were engineered by bill gates along with screwworm flies to make people vegan.
Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.
At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.
At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.
“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.
The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.
I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.
I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.
I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht.
I’m not worth the cost of a watch.
i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.
i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.
as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.
disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.
at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.
i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.
i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.
we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.
BLACK JEWS (…nuff said.)
Strange racists and homophobes on the internet seem to have access to an alternate way cooler version of TV than me. "every white character on TV is in an interracial relationship" "every show has a gay couple in it" "main characters keep having to secretly be bisexual and nonbinary" "every show has gratuitous full frontal nudity" like damn promise?? What channel???
as a black gay person real like where y'all be finding this stuff pass the name
for real though, those DO NOT WATCH OR YOU'LL CORRUPT YOUR CHILDREN lists put out by conservative christian family groups is where I find all the stellar tv shows. Like, shit I didn't know half of those existed, thanks for finding them for me, gonna go watch 30 hours of gay tv now!
I think I know how this works.
For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.
So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?
Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?
Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.
Same as the journalists describing Black Rock City as all naked. Same as the right-wing religious culture warriors describing television as entirely mixed-race and gender non-conforming. Not because it's even vaguely true, we know that, but because they haven't gotten over their discomfort over the last one by the time the next one comes along. The anger, not the stimulus, is the part that's continuous, so their mind lies to them that it's "all" the thing they can't get over.
Similar effect for the presence/proportion of women in things, by the way: https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/perception/how-17-equals-496-the-amazing-multiplying-women.htm
What’s the solution then? Or if there’s no solution, should we make things even queerer and more diverse?
I bring a real 'actually people who are pregnant do deserve some special consideration because they are effectively at least temporarily disabled if not permanently after some complications' vibe to the party that a lot of people don't seem to like
yeah yeah rainbow capitalism is bad and whatever but like. when I was a child, being pro gay was not the popular or lucrative choice. I'm happy that times have changed.
I miss rainbow capitalism. I do. I miss when it felt like public opinion was still pro gay. I understand it was always an empty gesture, but it mattered in a sense of knowing how socially acceptable being queer is. If that makes sense.
When I was in high school, I lived in a small progressive city in a spot of red. Our GSA threw everything into observing the Day of Silence, and blanketed the school in big, visible, bracelets for people to wear in support of their silent classmates.
On the bus one spring, on the Day of Silence, I overheard two girls talking about the fact that one of them was wearing a support bracelet. She said, "I don't actually support 'them', but, you know, it's basically socially suicide to say that."
And I was so, so glad. To know that I went to a school, in a place and a time, where people needed to conceal their hate, instead of needing to conceal their love.
The Gods Are Queer!
Happy Pride Month!!🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
I remember when I was younger, anytime I watched a movie where the characters have to kill a scary monster/alien, I always thought the act of killing it was intended to be part of the horror. Like there’s this amazing creature that we’ve never seen before, and maybe under different circumstances we could’ve coexisted with it, but it’s trying to attack you and you have to defend yourself, but by destroying it you also destroy the ability to ever understand it and that’s sad and is supposed to make you feel conflicted.
It was not until well into my adulthood that I realized most people do not have complicated feelings about movies where people have to kill a scary alien monster, nor is that necessarily meant to be part of the narrative (unless it very obviously is). They just want the scary thing to die because it’s scary. I don’t have a real conclusion to this I just started thinking about it for some reason.
I always felt I couldn't possibly be upset about dying to an alien monster because proof of otherwordly life is exactly what it'd take for me to die happy
I think about how in the Star Trek TOS episode Mantrap, they kill the salt vampire while also feeling regret at killing something which is the last of its kind.
top notch interaction I had with the ambulance crew after my accident a couple years back:
paramedic: hi, I'm Allan
me: you told me. and your colleague is Jim, and the man who found me is Peter. guess my short-term memory is okay
Allan: ..are you doing a cognitive function test on yourself
Allan, two minutes later, putting a third blanket around me: okay, how's that feeling now
me: well my feet are still freezing but it's okay, I know you need to focus on getting my core temperature up first
Allan: how many times has this happened to you
noteworthy that they literally had a mask on me hooked up to a tank pumping narcotics into my lungs through all this, and my body temperature was like 34°. I would have been doing well to just have both eyes pointed in the same direction
"This is great. I'm going to get a good grade in post-accident cognition."
hate when people think the only archetype possible for a male sidekick to a female protagonist is a soft boi and/or himbo. like the implication there is that the only reason a man would ever defer to a woman’s authority is if he was a bumbling idiot. love male supporting characters who are smart and strong and confident and can step up when necessary but still kind and humble enough to let someone else take the lead most of the time
ok another good point here
you can't fearmonger about HRT being an under-studied medication and then tell trans women our bodies aren't poorly understood by science. pick one, dog
I see a weird amount of people lately rooting bioessentialist arguments in things like differing heart attack symptoms for (cis) men and women. afaik there straight up isn't conclusive research yet into what factors cause these differences, whether they're caused by hormones or what, so trans people just straight up don't know what symptoms to expect. you can't argue about "sex differences" without understanding which aspect of "sex" is actually relevant to the subject. is it hormones? organs? what?
I just had a terf in my replies arguing about how people with XX and XY chromosomes react to medications differently because of hormones. when they were reminded HRT exists they swerved, lol
the sentence "birth chromosomes, when not intersex, are paramount to understanding chemical and hormonal reactions to medication" is kind of an icon to me. so much to unpick
-"birth chromosomes" ...?
-bringing up intersex people only to completely dismiss them, staple move in the terf moveset
-hormonal reactions to medication. so the medication reacts with the hormones. not the chromosomes
sex binary evangelists are so baffling. like so many of them will, unprompted, volunteer the information that they know intersex people exist, and then immediately discard them in the same breath to continue tamping down the conversation into two binary sexes
it's like a creationist acknowledging that humans evolved from apes and then still just arguing that god sculpted us out of dust
um so quick question you do know that the world isn’t divided into People Blindly Accepting Of Gender Roles and Smart Trans Ppl. the world isn’t divided into People In Romantic Relationships and Single Aros. the world isn’t divided into People Who Socialize Easily and Oppressed Autistics. the world isn’t divided into Enlightened Queer People and Stupid Misogynists. like you are aware of this ? i hope you are aware of this
scariest thing is when you're a kid in a huge family run by women and then you go over to a house that's deeply patriarchal & misogynistic. i remember when i was 8 years old and i got invited over to my friend's house for a big birthday party with her entire extended family. after the enormous lunch that served over 30 people, i got called into the kitchen to do literally hundreds of dishes, alongside all the other little girls and women. not only were the boys our age all excused from the meal to go play, but all the grown men went to the living room to watch sports together and drink. i couldn't believe it. i asked why some of the grownups were watching TV but the girls had to clean up and all the women just laughed and laughed at me.
as a teenager when i learned the word "sexist" and used it the older women balked at it and tried to convince me this arrangement was a good thing actually because women need space from men, and cleaning in the kitchen after parties is a sacred domain of safety. and i was like actually i think needing private safety from your own husbands, sons, and brothers sounds even worse. like do you understand you somehow made this even more troubling than it already was
like i think it's fine if a bunch of sister-in-laws/wives want time together without their husbands & brothers to talk together in camaraderie. i'm not judging that. obviously. but dare i ask why the women's meetup could only take place while doing manual labor for a nearby room full of men
it's also interesting how this ingrained rigid social structures in children bc i was mostly friends with boys at that age and in fact was at the birthday party of a friend who was a boy so i remember complaining to him at school that it was weird all the girls had to help clean up because i didn't know any of the other little girls so i felt really left out that i didn't get to hang out with my own friends for a chunk of the party and he and the other little boys were like "that's just the rules."
yeah growing up in the Appalachian bible belt I absolutely often saw this re-enforced by women.
every Porsche vehicle in Russia stopped working, for reasons that are unclear but apparently related to their anti-theft satellite connection, and I need everyone to understand that this is bad.
it's bad if this was intentional and a company can just decide to brick your car remotely whenever they like. it's bad if this was accidental and your car needs a constant connection to a satellite or it stops functioning.
it's bad even though it's Porsche because if they can do it to rich people with luxury cars they can do it to anyone. it's bad even though it's Russia because a) not every Russian is responsible for the acts of the Russian government and b) if they can do it in Russia they can do it anywhere.
this is not a "lol Russia get pwned" moment, this is another example of corporations ending the concept of ownership.
male entitlement in academic spaces is so boring. can’t tell you how many times i’ve been in a class and a girl gives a short, insightful analysis, and then a dude raises his hand and says “jumping off of that…” then says literally the same thing she said but longer and worse.
I hate to be that guy, but it doesn’t just happen to women. The assholes who do that will do that to anyone who’s analysis isn’t sufficiently complex and long winded for them.
Been done to me by people of both genders.
Also I have been guilty of doing this, so I apologize. Because I was overly excited and just couldn’t wait to talk…. yeah.
(Nothing is ever clear cut eh….)
this is art
my aunt is watching some generic daytime tv talkshow and the hosts are very cheerfully going "yknow this AI thing isnt actually as cool as i thought it was- i keep noticing the google overview getting facts wrong! isnt that weird?" and its very funny watching regular middle aged people finally catch on. we did it lads it took long enough.
I love that I learned about mega churches the old fashioned way many years ago.
I was on a train here in Denmark with my boyfriend at the time and we randomly got into a conversation with a very friendly young American guy. At some point he said he enjoyed how religion played a very small role here and mention growing up Christian and going to a mega church in the US.
We had no idea what he meant by mega church. He seemed equally surprised that we didn’t. When he explained it I remember feeling like he was explaining an alien culture to me. What do you mean it’s a church with room for thousands of people? Aren’t churches supposed to be close knit communities where people know each other? How can they hear the priest? Speakers? Yeah okay that makes sense. But can people even see the priest? Giant screens!? Okay that seems a bit much. What do you mean stage show!?
Please please imagine a very gentle American trying to not sound insane to two dumbfounded Danes with thick accents while they’re sitting on a train with the flat yellow flower fields going by at great speed outside on a bright summer day. It’s one of my favourite memories.