field journal

[dogpuppy]

[beardedmrbean]

Congratulations on the cat

[agnesmontague]

ive invented (note: dubious claim) something i call the bear diet which is mostly fruits and vegetables with fish as the main protein source and something like once a month you eat a few hyperprocessed foods of your liking because that is when you, the bear, raid a dumpster in the suburbs

[stellarskyes]

after the hyperprocessed foods, do you take tranquilizers to simulate getting captured by animal control and returned to the wild?

[agnesmontague]

i would settle for melatonin gummies but well. knock yourself out

[wyrm-house]

Chapter 7: Go to Bristol

[information-insecurity]

[soulren]

“Ghosts are real” I can see how you could believe that

“Ghosts aren’t real” it’s very fair and rational that you believe that

“Ghosts aren’t real anymore” I’m about to hear a poem or very sad story

“Ghosts aren’t real yet” the fuck are you going to do

[byjove]

here are some additional requirements I would add to the United States presidency:

you are not eligible for the presidency if you are over the age of 65, if you turn 65 in office, that is fine but you cannot campaign if you are over 65

you cannot be president if you are a felon

you cannot be president if you have a personal net worth over $8 million

you cannot be presidency if you have had to file for bankruptcy in a business venture

you cannot be president if you cannot pass a basic neurological exam

you cannot be president if you have been convicted of or found liable for any sex crime, domestic violence or sexual harassment. unproven allegations are cause for investigation and can result in immediate termination from office if proven.

you cannot be president if you have been divorced more than once

you cannot be president if you never smoked weed out of a soda can in high school

you have to be up to date on all of your shots and forklift certification

[steadyangelcharger]

ageism, ableism, and felon disenfranchisement...

I'm so glad this isn't a serious post.

[information-insecurity]

It's all fun and dandy and seems reasonable until you start thinking which fundamental human and/or democratic rights you have to make conditional to make that happen

Although I'd put a pin in that 65 thing because it already has a threshold of 35 years minimum, so making it a bracket isn't that much of a problem. Democracy is built on constant rotation, including rotation of generations in power

[targetedknowledge]

[information-insecurity]

In this economy?!

[creekfiend]

ppl use crab bucket metaphor to describe the lateral social violence of oppressed people, but tbh I think it's more like how sometimes when chickens are kept in such abysmal horrific close quarters conditions with no ability to make decisions or control any aspect of their lives, they just start violently attacking each other, to the point where some factory farms where this is a problem simply cut or trim parts of their beaks off so they can't do as much damage. because this is more cost effective than providing them with more space, species specific enrichment, appropriate lighting, etc, and the system we live under prioritizes cost effectiveness over the well-being of alive creatures.

it would be a mistake to think that this represents the natural behavior of chickens.

it would be a mistake to think that the social displacement harms we do to each other as marginalized people under a great deal of stress, under capitalism, represents the natural behavior of people.

human beings, however, possess the ability to learn to identify when we are engaging in this type of lateral social violence, and the ability to prioritize developing alternate coping mechanisms that cause less harm to the other people in our communities, and leave us with more energy to address the actual causes of our suffering.

[information-insecurity]

Crabs' natural response to danger is to hold on to each other, because that way a predator won't be able to lift its victim off the sea floor. The Bucket is very much that same thing, an unknown and possibly dangerous environment that the crabs are not familiar with, so they respond by grabbing the nearest neighbor and holding for dear life. The cure for this behaviour is not fucking putting crabs in buckets

[butch-tradwife]

For everyone who ‘used to love reading’ but now hasn’t finished a book in years, you CAN get it back. Genuinely start bringing a book (preferably short and either fiction or a non fiction topic you already really enjoy) everywhere you go and when you have 5-20 mins waiting for the bus or at the doctors office or mechanic or whatever, get out your book and read it! You don’t have to finish it quickly or even read it often but it is so good for your brain and fun to get into the habit of reading more (and replacing being on your phone for those moments). Source: I read 0 books in 2023 and I’ve read 12 in the first 4 months of 2026

[thehmn]

There’s a college in my city that has a rumor that there’s a secret basement below the known basement that can only be accessed via some hidden stairs scattered around the school or by pressing a secret number sequence in some of the elevators. The staff at the school are super annoyed by this and have no idea where this rumor started.

But I know. I think it was me.

In my defense I never intended to start a rumor. Many years ago I worked as a cleaner at the school and one evening I had to transport one of those big floor washing machines from the basement to the second level via the elevator. When the doors opened a very confused looking man stood inside. He was one of those slicked back gym-bro IT guys and made no movement to get out. The elevator wouldn’t fit him, me and the machine so I asked “Where are you going? Up or down?”

He gave me a smug shit-eating grin and said “Down?” in a mocking tone.

It took me a second to realize that of course he wasn’t going down, we were in the basement, but his look and tone annoyed me so much I refused to admit I misspoke and instead said “Yeah, down. I don’t know if you’re going to the second basement”

His smile disappeared “There’s a second basement?”

“Yeah but it sounds like you don’t have access to it so I guess you’re going up? I’ll just wait”

I never thought of it as anything other than a funny story to tell about that time I got so annoyed with a guy that I invented an entire second basement, but it turns out he probably refused to believe a cleaner fooled him and the story spread.

[byjove]

I am so fucking serious about more medical shows needing to be sent in poorly funded hospitals where the staff is fighting for human life AND an uphill battle against the hospital itself. I think so many popular medical shows being set it frankly utopian university & research hospitals with cutting edge tech and the ability to run any test and do any procedure paints a false picture of what medicine is like for the majority of people.

[information-insecurity]

A Young Doctor's Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov, basically

[tuesday-is-a-good-day]

“there’s no platonic explanation for this”

Well there is actually, they’re friends. They’re friends and they love each other and it doesn’t mean any less than if they were dating and they loved each other. They’re friends and that means devotion and affection and loyalty and love, and there is no point in which that love reaches a level that immediately indicates that their relationship must be romantic.

[eraserheadadult]

one time in college i was in a creative writing class and this guy was holding up the critique with what i can only describe as like cinemasins dinging another student's writing. and at some point the professor said "the plot is the fork and the prose is the meal. you are critiquing the taste of the fork"

[butt-rice]

i wish there was a way to say "you're right, but this is really ineffective and even counterproductive messaging to anyone who doesn't already agree with you" without sounding like an asshole

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

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.

[abundantchewtoys]

[alex51324]

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.

[ignescent]

And remember, "we can't find people to hire" almost always means "we're not offering a high enough paycheck".

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#as someone also in Australian healthcare#yep#they nearly fucked my states entire ambulance service a few years ago#the government and the major telcos decided to turn off 3G which in the rural area I grew up in was sometimes the only reliable signal#like at all#and the ambulance service had to Libby the government to push it back because every defibrillator had a fucking button Nokia#that Nokia would transfer every ECG (the thing that tells paramedics if you’re having a heart attack) to the doctors who could advice us#it literally determined the protocols paramedics used#every ambulance had to update every single defibrillator and phone so that we could keep people alive#but in the rural area like mine it became glaringly obvious they needed 4G coverage#it took way too long to sort it all out it was a massive deal#I still remember the paramedics I was with at the time stressing out over it all#ignorance and complacency is the highest killer because when something small and seemingly innocuous happens like 3G being turned off#or a nanny not being able to work#it shows how deeply and fundamentally our health system here in Australia is struggling

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Cats are great because they just accept that being Bothered by you is like. Part of the social contract.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Unfortunately this contract is reciprocal and they will call due when you are trying to play computer games specifically

[dragon-in-a-fez]

obliterate the concept of "spoiling" a child. excise it from your lexicon like a cancer. that is some "the opposite of sin is suffering" Puritan ass bullshit. it is not possible to ruin a person through an overabundance of kindness.

[information-insecurity]

Uhhhhh have you ever seen a real spoiled child, or any spoiled person at all? The one that has never heard the word "no" and therefore has zero idea of what is unacceptable towards other people? You can absolutely ruin a person through overabundance of kindness IF that kindness is only directed at that one particular person and comes at a cost of being rude, dismissive and generally mean towards all others