back to this again

ahhhh

[idkits-ablog]

crash

[bluebudgie]

there's several layers of funny in here all of which i can't quite explain

[outofcontextdiscord]

[the-one-eyed-witch-deactivated2]

My brain cannot accept that able bodied people don’t have a base pain level. Like? You’re not in pain?? At all??? Even a little bit??? You don’t have a constant background radiation of pain???

Sounds fake but ok

[quinnception]

"The normal amount of pain is zero"

Sure it is

[runby2]

Remember if you’re out at a store and someone says “This is a robbery” you can say “no it’s not” and then the robber will leave because theyre a robber and this is no longer a robbery .

[runby2]

You can not just say this without dropping the whole story

[alonelybeemakingart]

Ok so,

My dads coworker is at the front and this man comes Up and hands him a document.

The coworker took a Look at the document and while he couldn't read the things written by Hand, because he wasn't wearing his glases, he did notice the Logo of a different Bank so he's like:

"Oh, sorry sir you can't do that here! You have to go to the other Bank for this :)"

The man, visibly confused leaves, but dosen't take the document with him.

The coworker, now just as confused as the Guy actually Takes Out his glases and reads the hand written part:

This is a robbery

[gay-jesus-probably]

Can you imagine trying to rob a god damn bank and the teller just cheerfully tells you to go rob the competition instead

[theprofessional-amateur-deactiv]

I worked as a bank teller for several years and a few things you should know, bank robberies happen far more frequently than you might think and they come in waves. When a bank gets robbed a notification with photos goes to all banks in the area to be on the lookout. And there are two kinds of robbery, the pass the note and the takeover (what you see in movies).

So our branch had had a big takeover robbery as well as a note one. We also had a teller that had transferred to our branch after having been through a robbery. She was sweet as apple pie, hair up to the ceiling, southern lady who had just been through multiple robberies.

A guy comes in and hands her a folded note. Her immediate thought was “this guy needs to learn you don’t hand bank tellers notes. I am just not going to read that.” So how the conversation goes:

Her: how can I help you today?

Him: I’m here to get money

Her: great *hands him a withdrawal slip*

Him: all the information is on the paper

Her: to process the transaction I need you to put it on my piece of paper

SO HE FILLS OUT A WITHDRAWAL SLIP. Meanwhile another coworker is looking at her latest robbery notification email thinking the guy at the window looks a lot like him but the teller is calm and seems to be following standard transaction.

Back at the window the teller notices his name on the withdrawal slip doesn’t match the name on the account so she asks for his ID. He once again tells her all the relevant info is on the folded note but also gives her his ID and says it is his dad’s account. She tells him he will need a check from his dad to get cash. He grabs the note and leaves.

ONE HOUR LATER

Two new robbery notifications hit our emails, both branches within a mile. It is our guy. Teller goes over to the manager and sheepishly informs them he was here and the time. Security department is notified as are local police and the FBI. The FBI comes over believing that these poor tellers had been robbed for the 3rd time in a month and take her statement. She is completely embarrassed telling them how everything went down and he kept signaling to the note and telling her to read it but she was just done.

To which this FBI agent of 40 years who has been to the scene of many bank robberies (several at this branch in recent weeks) says: Ok. Let me see if I got this right, he came in fully intending to rob you. He gave you the note and you just…refused to read it? So he left and went to the bank literally across the street, handed them the exact same note, and they just handed him five grand? Do I have that correct?”

Her: I am so embarrassed

FBI: this is best thing I have ever heard. He even handed you his ID! Holy-

Her: I feel so dumb!

FBI: don’t! This is the best thing I have ever heard. This is going to be in training courses. (He sat there giddy for at least 5 more minutes)

[demilypyro]

Thinking about how they not only made pinkie pie canonically straight but they just had to involve weird al in it

[demilypyro]

The last one. She fucked that man

[legodotcom]

HUH

[demilypyro]

WEIRD AL WAS A REOCCURING CHARACTER AND IN THE LAST EPISODE SHE HAD HIS BABY OKAY IM NOT INTO IT EITHER

[legodotcom]

HUH

[lemonsharks]

Someone please start up a peer reviewed Journal of We Were So Wrong In Science (abbreviation: J. Wrong) so people can publish their work when it doesn't pan out. Preferably in multiple fields.

Because when the hypothesis is wrong we learn things and they're important like how the shit doesn't work.

Imagine a whole family of journals called We Were So Wrong In: Field and then the much anticipated We Were So Wrong In Science Annual which collects and reprints the best failures of the year with updates on where those failures led.

Wrongest team to lead to a discovery of gets the Innovators In Trying Again When You're Wrong Award which comes with a hilarious trophy inspired by the Nailed It! trophy and a nice piece of funding.

So anyway that's another one of my "I just won the billion dollar Powerball" projects.

[batbetbitbotbut]

I would like this and also unlimited funds for attempting to replicate other people's research (the more boring, the better). Journal of Are You Sure.

[lemonsharks]

If I ever win the billion dollar powerball I will ALSO fund the Journal Of Are You Sure About: Field? and the Journal Of Are You Sure About That? Annual (abbreviation: J. U. Sure?)

[saint-batrick]

sometimes i get so angry about how the housing market bubble bursting led to the economy collapsing and literally never recovering for the middle class. like...basically wiped out the middle class entirely, if we're being honest.

my bank just offered me a "high yield" savings account. high yield! just a fucking amazing APY! ...the APY is 0.4%. zero. point. four.

in 2006, i worked in a call center for $17.60 an hour and had a savings account with a 9% APY. not 0.9%, a full fucking 9%. i'd only been with the call center for a year and a half, i was 24 years old, my credit was middling at best, and that savings account was brand fucking new with a bank i'd NEVER banked with.

high yield. 0.4%.

my field is in-home healthcare now, and i get paid $9.25 an hour.

the fucking rage i feel at what was taken away from my end of my generation (eldest millennial) and fully denied to everyone younger than us is unreal sometimes.

[eversoslightlybitter]

You got $17.60 for call center work???????

[saint-batrick]

yup. in 2004 in texas (which had an obscenely low cost of living at the time, i rented a 2br/2ba apartment for $720/mo) - so not somewhere with a really high cost of living like NYC that would NOW seem to justify this shit as a starting wage, i was hired on at $14.75 an hour to an absolutely entry level position. over a year and a half, i had gotten raises that bumped me to $16/hr (without having advanced my position at all, exact same position i was hired in), and then took a 2p-11p shift VERY happily because i had that fucked up 4am-noon delayed sleep cycle...but because that was considered an "undesirable" shift, i got a 10% raise for being on that shift. and short staffing wasn't a thing, so i would often see up to five minutes between calls.

this was normal for the time.

[phallicthimble]

And if you're renting now, you're positively fucked. Even if you could save some money for a down payment for a house, you will never save it fast enough since the price of housing is going up $2000-$5000 PER MONTH unless you want to live 90-120 minutes from where the actual jobs are. My share of rent in 2004 was about $375/month. My jump in monthly rent just from 2021 to 2022 was almost that much. All because I don't want to live downwind from a slaughterhouse with neighbors who have seasonal cross burnings.

[saint-batrick]

the apartment that was $720 in 2006, the literal exact same apartment, is now $2059.

i knew it would have gone up astronomically, but i'd never looked it up and i am feeling such blind rage.

[outofcontextdiscord]

[princesskuragina]

Marriage is about having good sex and committing unspeakable acts of violence for one another

[princesskuragina]

"it's about love" yes and love is tearing a man's heart out of his chest and presenting it to your beloved wife because he dared to disrespect her. And then getting absolutely railed.

[yallidarityforever]

[patt-off]

she/her -> she/they -> they/them -> they/he -> he/they -> he/him

went from one end to another gradually

[professional-chaotic-dumbass]

he/him -> he/they? -> they/them -> they/she -> she/they

[cannibalcaprine-deactivated2024]

he/him → she/they → she/her

i wanted it done as quickly as possible

[guiltiest-gear]

Sometimes you just gotta push the gas pedal all the way down when it comes to pronouns

[ampervadasz]

[memewhore]

He tryin’

[mrdistracted]

apex predator

[gardenofpawprints]

Fun fact! Cats can’t track up-and-down movement as well as they can track side-to-side movements. It’s the pupil shape.

[modmad]

so what I’m understanding from this is if I get chased by a giant cat what I need to survive is a pogo stick

[leefi]

[gay-impressionist]

If you are silent about your pain they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it - Zora Neale Hurston

[beemovieerotica]

best way I have found to comfort people who are endlessly apologetic of things outside their control (often as a result of shitty relationships) is the jokingly hyperbolic accusation of [gasp] "so you're behind it all!"

like someone giving me directions who starts apologizing profusely when I miss a light as if it's their fault--[gasp] "it was you who petitioned city council to build this intersection in 1893!!" because it snaps them out of it and they laugh like. oh yeah. that's a ridiculous thing to blame someone for. I'm not that guy. you're not that guy. it works.

[bubonickitten]

Sometimes when I'm bored and don't have the energy to actually Do anything, I go browse the EA bug forums (specifically the Sims ones) because they are hilarious both in and out of context

Like

And then I scroll down and

[spnyuri]

bring terms like aroflux and greyace back into the public eye start undoing the damage ace discourse did to those labels fr

[systlin]

Me being traumatized and not wanting that to happen to other kids makes me a bad person now :)) I’m disgusting :)) and horrible :)) and it’s my fault that happened :)) and everybody hates me more now :)) cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool.

You are not horrible. And I do not hate you. It is not your fault that it happened. But things that are marked as adult very clearly are not for kids, and if you read it anyway it is on the people who should have been supervising you and did not intervene, or, assuming that you were old enough to know what ‘adult content’ means and chose to engage with stuff produced by adult fans for adult fans, on you for ignoring the warnings.

If a ten year old child goes to a library right now, and walks to the romance section and pulls down a book, that child’s guardians are responsible for saying “Hey now that is not for you.” If that same child comes back at thirteen and, knowing there is content in that book that adults do not want them to read, furtively hides away from guardian’s eyes and reads it anyway, that is not the fault of the library for having that book, or the author for writing it.

I am very sorry you’ve been hurt. But adults are going to produce content for adults, and if you ignore the guidelines set in place to keep kids out of that content, then that’s not the fault of the adults who wrote the stuff.

[catsandwitchcraft]

I do not understand this new generation of kids doing the internet equivalent of going into a clearly marked strip club, showing a fake ID to the bouncer and then being shocked and appalled by it being full of adults and strippers.

[ruffboi-mags]

Well I had this whole paragraphs-long response I added, and you got it in like. A sentence.

like i get this argument, i really do, and there really is only so much content creators can do to try and stop children consuming content not suitable for them

BUT we cannot trust a thirteen year old to have the maturity and foresight to know what is and isn’t good for them. Yeah, their gaurdians should be the ones looking out for them and trying to stop them from getting hurt, but in your library analogy, when the library chooses to have that content it’s also somewhat responsible for restricting access to it - whether that’s putting those books somewhere the librarian can monitor most of the time, or having a slightly restricted sentence you need to be registered and have a verified age to go into, but there needs to be something - if you knowingly let unmonitored kids into your buisness, but especially if you encourage them like libraries do, you are responsible for their safety- it takes a village to raise a child and we are all responsible for their safety

that said it’s deffo not the authors responsibility, but the host, tumblr, ao3, where ever. they gotta do something

[joyfulldreams]

They literally already are. Rating and tagging everything as mature and clearly marking content is the barrier. This isn’t a movie theater or a library. None of those websites are KNOWINGLY allowing children into their business, because EVERYONE IS INVISIBLE.

There is literally no way to effectively bar children from accessing content they shouldn’t have access to, that doesn’t involve gross invasions of privacy. You can ban all children from a website and that STILL won’t work because there is no actual way to accurately determine who is and isn’t a child. In a lot of cases the bare minimum you can do is just outright ASK if they are a child, but then they LIE and there is no way to STOP them from lying or even figuring out IF they are lying. Hell, not even outright banning all icky things will work, as Tumblr’s disastrous NSFW ban has shown us.

‘We all have a collective responsibility to protect children’ only goes so far. If all children are invisible and can be literally anywhere at any point, ‘collective responsibility’ ends up meaning ‘in your day to day life, you must always act under the assumption that there MIGHT HYPOTHETICALLY be a child in the room’. We can’t help raise a child if we literally cannot see them and don’t even have any way of confirming their existence. And it is going too damn far to tell adults they are not allowed to do adult things with other adults because a child MIGHT POTENTIALLY be able to see them do it, even if they’re not supposed to, especially if they’re not supposed to. It’s also going too far to tell all websites that they are responsible for keeping track of legions of invisible, hypothetical, lying children.

All methods of reliably confirming people’s age online are immediately gross and dangerous invasions of privacy. All measures to try and prevent children from seeing things they shouldn’t are flimsy, at best. The MOST EFFECTIVE thing is the thing we are doing already: meticulously tagging and archiving content with extensive filters and multiple warnings, so that every potential viewer can make an informed decision about what they choose to look at.

Which means that, at the end of the day, dumb 13-year-olds and the few people in their lives who can see them as Not Invisible are going to have to take responsibility for themselves, and potentially each other.

[truxi-twice]

Hey so also, just to address part of what lnalovegd said, that thing about libraries being somewhat responsible for restricting access to certain materials…

No, actually.

That is the opposite of what libraries are supposed to do.

Public libraries do not–and CANNOT–restrict materials. At all. You hear every now and again of some that do. It is not a good road to go down. I live in a city with a lot of conservatives (the attempt at a drag queen storytime nearly got the library defunded by a lot). Whose judgement do you use? How do you determine that?

You could say “ratings” but honestly, that’s still not great, since LGBTQ things get rated higher than hetero things. Books don’t really have ratings, and they shouldn’t.

When I worked at the desk of the public library, one thing we HAD to practice was impartiality. It meant handing people hateful books like Anne Coulter’s drek without a side eye. It also meant that if a kid showed up at the desk with a library card and, say… Saw or the Godfather… well. I was going to check it out to them. That’s how public libraries run. Anyone can check out anything, and parental approval is not needed (for us. Parents might have other ideas. I still get mad remembering this woman who wouldn’t let her son check out Calvin & Hobbes or certain other books. But again, I did not say a word. Neutrality).

It’s crucial to a public library that we operate like that.

Libraries do not restrict material. We can organize it. Kids sections, teen sections, adult sections. But no librarian or library tech is going to monitor what children are checking out.

Yeah, kids won’t always know what they’re picking up. The first romance I ever picked up had sex and graphic medieval torture in it. I sure wasn’t expecting it. I stopped reading it. Then when the internet happened…hoo boy, you kids should have seen that wild west.

Comparatively now, I see folks really make every effort to use tags and warnings. Maybe you know what it means, maybe you don’t. But they’re there. They’re the best method we have for keeping content away from people who would be emotionally harmed by it, or who just plain don’t want to see it.

At the end of the day, if you’re old enough to go looking for content on your own, you’re going to have to accept that you might see things you don’t want to see. Yes, even as kids.

There are kid-friendly websites and forums where you can go if you don’t want to deal with that.

[glorious-spoon]

The fact that so many people just blithely go ‘oh, well of course libraries restrict what content they’ll allow minors to access and monitor what they check out and notify their guardians if they’re reading something (that the librarian deems) inappropriate’ always makes me want to scream.

[hawthornewhisperer]

Just to add on: a small town in Wisconsin went through this ~10 years ago, when local conservatives tried to get YA books with LGBT content moved to the adult section and labeled “sexually explicit” to try and deter children from accessing them. Librarians refused, and in retaliation the town council refused to renew the contracts of four library board members for supporting them. 

The books stayed where they were.

Librarians do NOT fuck around.

[legsdemandias]

Yeah, I just want to say as someone who works in a library, that it’s absolutely NOT my job to smack books out of kids hands? Sometime last year a 12 year old girl wanted to read YA books and her guardian was down for it so we handed her The Cruel Prince, Children of Blood and Bone, and Eragon (likes fantasy series) and like all of those contain content that I might cringe to give my own 12 year old niece–but dad was okay with it. She decided for herself that she wasn’t about that Cruel Prince vibes and put it down before it got to the sex and “adult man on teen girl” action–which has always been the goal.

Libraries want children and adults to monitor their own consumption of materials, children with the guidance of their parents until they can make that decision for themselves. 

“whether that’s putting those books somewhere the librarian can monitor most of the time, or having a slightly restricted sentence you need to be registered and have a verified age to go into, but there needs to be something”

^^^^ This?? does not exist. Especially not the bolded part. There’s actually more monitoring in children’s areas for children’s books that are made for children than there is in the adult section. We barely watch those books and if a 8 year old wants to read The Shining? Holla. Mom signed off on his card, she better be watching. 

This scene here with Matilda could never have happened if Libraries required matilda to have a “rated access” on certain books. Charles Dickens, at the lowest, is usually sorted into YA. Remember, Matilda is going into kindergarten.

[annissamazing]

I was ten or eleven when I started pulling books off the romance novel shelves. My dad saw, took me aside, and told me the books had some parts that might make me uncomfortable, and if I was uncomfortable, that it was ok to skip a few pages and get back to the story.

He didn’t bar me from reading or censor my chosen content; he gave me the tools to make my own decisions.

[nonasuch]

When I was ten or eleven, I read all of my dad’s Stephen King and John Grisham books, because they were books and they were in my house and I’d run out of new things to read. 

Were they appropriate for me? No. 

Should my parents have noticed me reading them, and stopped me? Probably!

Is that the fault of anyone outside my house? also no.

The thing is, a couple of years later when I started reading fanfic, I knew, from that experience, that I did not want to read fiction with a lot of violence or explicit sex, so I avoided fic labeled as such and back-buttoned out of a lot of stories as soon as the kissing started.

[kangofu-cb]

My 12 year old is a voracious reader. We talk about book series she’s interested in. Sometimes I google the ones I’m not too sure about and sometimes I know them already - but I’ve never outright told her she couldn’t read a specific book or series of books. We talk about the content and why I think it might not be age appropriate (she reads at college level) but she gets to make those decisions for herself.

This year she discovered ao3 (please god don’t let her find me I’d never recover from the embarrassment and neither would she) and we talked about what the ratings and warning tags were about and for. I don’t police her reading but I give her the tools and information to make informed and (I hope) good choices.

As a parent that’s my real job. To provide tools and guidance, not police her content consumption or hide things from her.

Don’t make fandom censorship about “but think of the childrenz” becayse that’s not what it is. It’s not really about children - it’s about virtue signaling.

Parenting is about thinking about the kids; fandom is about making content you enjoy creating and enjoying the content that’s been created. Properly tagged fanfiction is probably safer for kids in that regard than wandering unaccompanied around the library and picking up, for example, Clan of the Cave Bear which triggered me so hard (at 11) that I’ve never fully recovered.

[prismatic-bell]

ALSO also?

Every kid is different.

I was reading books WAY above my age level as a kid. And here’s the thing:

Agatha Christie, with all its murder and lying and people having affairs? I loved it. (Still love it.) Mysteries were my lifeblood and I still adore them.

Stephen King, who I now love? I was TERRIFIED of Stephen King. I picked up my first King at 17, and it was because I’d seen a tiny bit of The Tommyknockers as a kid (my mom recorded it to watch at night, I sneaked out of my room, this isn’t on her) and it scared the bejeezus out of me, and I thought reading the book might help. (It did!)

But on a “rating” system, King and Christie would probably be about the same. One was a favorite. One I wouldn’t touch for fear. Another kid might be the exact opposite—just fine with the monsters and horror, but horrified of the murder.

At some point, you have to let the kids decide. You can’t always be there.

[demonicae]

The internet isn’t your babysitter. Be responsible for the media you consume.

If something isn’t for you, put it down and walk away.

It’s no one’s problem but yours if you encounter content that upsets you.

The moment you call for restrictions on written media is the moment you have decided to hand authorities too much power over the written word. That never ends well, never.

[alex51324]

Here’s a thing I’ve tried to say before, and I’ll try to say again:  I don’t blame kids for wishing that random adults would give them more help controlling their impulses around things that are intriguing-yet-disturbing (which includes, but is not limited to, sexual content).  The problem is mistaking that wish for an actual responsibility on the part of strangers.  

Controlling impulses is the number 1 thing that adolescents are known to be, neurologically, bad at, and when things are working as they should, they would be getting that help, from the adults who actually know and love them.  But there are a lot of parents & other caregivers who have either abdicated that responsibility (sometimes for sympathetic reasons, such as being overwhelmed with other issues, sometimes for shitty ones), or go too far in the other direction and try to block their children from seeing/reading/hearing/watching anything they might have questions about, rather than genuinely helping them to understand their own comfort levels around certain types of content.  

If you’re a teenager and you don’t have anyone you can turn to for help finding content that meets your comfort level, or identifying what should go on your personal No Fly List, or working through your feelings when you inadvertently see something that disturbs you, that sucks.  It’s a shitty situation, and you deserve better.

You do not, however, deserve it from every random stranger on the entire internet.  For all the reasons that have been amply explained upthread, it’s just too big an ask to expect literally everyone else in the world to pick up the slack left by the adults who are actually supposed to looking out for you.  

If creators are tagging accurately, rating appropriately, and using content warnings, they are exercising the maximum level of care for your well-being that is appropriate to the relationship they have with you, a teenager they have never met or interacted with.  

If you see something and think, “Someone should have stopped me from seeing that,” you’re right.  But the person who should have stopped you isn’t the person who wrote or drew it.  That is not the relationship they have with you.  

As an emerging adult, you should be developing the critical thinking skills and emotional awareness to recognize when something’s starting to make you uncomfortable, and the self-confidence to nope out when it does.  If the people who are actually bringing you up aren’t helping you with that–or are actively hindering you from developing those skills–that really, really sucks.  Take a minute to be mad about it–and then start developing those skills on your own.  

(Here’s a free hint:  A main reason that you may have trouble identifying and acting on your own discomfort is if your caregivers send chaotic signals about safety versus danger: exaggerating or inventing dangers in situations that are really safe, or putting you in dangerous situations and acting like it’s normal.  Either one can fuck up your threat-detection system.  You can start to re-calibrate it by consciously checking in with yourself:  how am I feeling right now?  What physical sensations or thoughts accompany this emotion?  Do I want to keep feeling this way?  If not, what activity/aspect of my environment/etc. is contributing to feeling this way?  What will happen if I stop doing the thing/remove the thing from my environment?  Is there a benefit to pushing through my discomfort?  Is there a downside to opting out?  If I decide to push through, is there something I can do to make myself more comfortable?)

[can-i-make-image-descriptions]

[Gif ID/ Matilda from the movie Matilda saying “Lately I’ve been reading Charles Dickens. I could read him every day.” /End ID]