space space space space space knowledge

Eli ✖ they/them ✖ Jewish ✖ Sheffield, UK ✖ an intrepid little queer on the eternal quest to pet my cat and sleep for 16 hours a day

[theoutcastrogue]

"If you think curiosity without rigor is bad, you should see rigor without curiosity."

xkcd: Good Science

[snapcracklepop-myjoints]

happy disability pride month to mean cripples, nasty addicts, people with down syndrome who arent nice and talk constant shit, wheelchair users that WILL run you over, autists that dont care and arent about to pretend to, people who lie to their psychiatrists, people that sit on the floor in public places with no benches, amputees that lie profusely about "what happened", ; to the "noncompliant", the "drug seeking", the "mean", the "difficult" and the "undeserving", and so on and so forth, i love us all and we deserve the world actually mwah mwah

[snapcracklepop-myjoints]

to people that hide contraband in their assistive devices. to people that do party tricks they arent supposed to and people who will spit on you if you ask them to do party tricks. to people that weaponise the infantalisation of disabled people for their own purposes (theft et. al.). to the people who "misuse" their medication and people who dont take it at all. to my mother, who takes out her hearing aids when she doesnt want to hear shit anymore but will still pretend to be listening so you dont catch on. to people who sleep all the time and to people with "abnormal" circadian rhythms who are unwilling to alter their sleep/wake cycle to best appeal to societal (and moral) expectations. to people that complain loudly about inaccessibility and refuse to try and "make it work". to people that charge money for invasive questions and people that pretend not to understand the question at all.

[gaybichon]

i think i found my new favorite artist on twitter

(source)

[gaybichon]

👆 me

[damejoansutherland]

oh also i stumbled upon this today and almost started crying in the street

[jonaldronaldrolkientolkien]

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire | Jewish Women's Archive

On March 25, 1911, a fire erupted at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York, resulting in 146 deaths and many injuries, most of them yo

They were also mostly Jewish, which for whatever reason isn't mentioned on this plaque.

[beastliness]

regular boyfriend maintenance is essential for both safety and performance

[beastliness]

you should be routinely inspecting his gears and other moving parts, checking for signs of overheating, insufficient lubrication, alignment of shafts, etc.

[sinni-ok-sessi]

I do think the ability to emoji-react is a net win for human communication. not only does it give you an outlet for 'I see and acknowledge this but don't have a verbal response' but it also adds a pleasing alethiometer element to things

my coworker announces that he's off to the dentist. someone reacts with a tooth emoji. is this a statement of dentist solidarity? a wish for my coworker to return with more (or fewer?) teeth than he set out with? simple word association? who can say

[darkmatters-world]

[basuralindo]

So I just simultaneously did, and possibly didn't lose my job today :)

Very much did in the sense that I literally do not know where my job is at the moment. But, for the time being I haven't been let go because nobody else including the store owner knows where it is either.

So, I don't wanna risk doxxing myself by posting pictures but goddamn am I tempted because this is not a believable event. This is a cartoon problem. For looneytoons.

But yeah, so, I work(ed?) at a kiosk selling boba tea, right? Freestanding kiosk in the mall with full water and electrical hookups and multiple fridges and sinks and a mini kitchen and the works. Fully functional tea shop. Very important to note that it was there last night, The work chat was discussing another issue last night at closing time. I'll get back to this.

It's been showing signs of being on the way out with how business is being handled lately and I've been considering other options, which is probably why I'm not as torn up about this as I should be, but maybe it just hasn't set in yet, but that's not the point. The point is there's been a lot of shit breaking and not being replaced and nobody mentioning anything about it until I walk into work in the morning and have to figure out why shit like the fucking cash register isn't there today. So I'm kinda used to having to ask questions about big things that nobody bothered to update me on. I was out for two weeks recovering from a surgery, so I came to work this morning assuming there'd be some kind of bullshit, yeah?

So, the question I had to ask the chat this morning was:

Not a text I ever thought I'd have to send in sincerity, but there it is. Because what I found instead was a fenced off patch of discolored tiles and a few holes in the floor where my entire place of employment used to be.

And the answer? Nobody knows! It was there last night when the mall closed, and every single trace of the structure and all its contents including drink making supplies and our safe and cashbox was gone when it opened again. And when I say nobody knows, I mean everyone from last night's closers to the actual (former?) owner of the store jad no fucking clue about this until getting that text from me this morning. For once I am actually the first to know. 🎉.

So. I guess I didn't so much lose my job as had it stolen. Not by AI, but good old fashioned hands-on human beings picking it up and carrying it away somehow. All mall security would tell me was that they were instructed not to tell me anything and have us contact our management. Who also don't know anything. And later on I came across some construction workers around the gravesite of the kiosk discussing filling in the holes, asked them about it, and was told that they "weren't at liberty to say".

So, not only is my job gone in the most literal physical sense of the word, but it was taken in some kind of super secret kiosk extraction in the dead of night without any warning or witnesses and nobody is allowed to speak of it. The store owner said she was gonna figure it out 10 hours ago and still no word back.

I don't know what else to say aside from I've been laughing all day and I'm gonna have a hell of a time explaining Schrodinger's Unemployment to the benefits office.

[basuralindo]

Update that is not an update because I'm basically certain this isn't what actually happened:

My mother in law thinks the FBI took it.

Not any of the other stores around the state. Just the one little kiosk.

Why? Because she loves a conspiracy and is just a little bit extra.

Also because she was around for the massive crackdown on Yakuza-owned businesses in Waikiki (in her homestate) that did actually involve the FBI seizing stores (no confirmation of making kiosks cleanly disappear in the middle of the night though).

Still no word from my job on what's actually going on, but the most likely theory so far is that maybe the kiosk was on lease and got repossessed? The mystery continues

(also shout out to the person who proposed Carmen Sandiego)

[basuralindo]

ACTUAL (partial) UPDATE:

According to the owner, based on what she's been able to find out, the kiosk was not removed legally and they're starting a potentially long process of legal action. I hope she gets to sue the shit out of whoever did it but for now at least I know for sure I'm unemployed.

Really hoping for more details in terms of who/why/how, so I'll keep updating if I learn anything.

For now the summary is: An unnamed entity that is most likely mall management (on account of mall security cooperating with them) stole an entire kiosk and all the contents including money and machinery with barely a trace in the middle of the night grinch-style, with zero warning or explanation, and ensured the silence of both security and the construction crew, in an action that was definitely preplanned and illegal, and as far as I know nobody knows its whereabouts.

So now I'm officially out of a job. Because my workplace was literally stolen in the night.

[basuralindo]

Actually fuck it let's share some photos cause I wouldn't be inclined to believe this myself. It's not like anyone can stalk me at my job now and I'm not gonna have to see any coworkers that might find my tumblr.

Enjoy the unintentionally funniest text I've ever sent in my life

Aaand a close-up:

The last remains of a once Very Much Solid And Immobile Workplace

[facts-i-just-made-up]

What is Tumblr?

Tumblr is the opiate of the very, very few.

[chimaerakitten]

Black Sails really is like

Flint: [brutally raw and yet also poetic monologue about the nature of colonial “civilization”]

[HARD CUT]

[CAPTAIN VANE is wearing a HENLEY from old navy INSIDE OUT]

[sparvverius]

i really love the way that black sails deals with romantic vs platonic relationships where the ideal connection is that of equal partners and whether it's a romantic or platonic connection is a secondary concern. the show is very explicit that anne's attraction to max is romantic and sexual in a way her connection to jack isn't, but they are both her partners and she loves and needs them both and to be asked to choose between them is a nightmare scenario for her. silver puts flint's romance with thomas hamilton, his friendship with gates, and his ?????? with miranda on the same level because those were all fundamentally partnerships. nothing changes about the hamiltons' marriage whether you interpret it as romantic or not because no matter what they were partners. the will-they-won't-they of silver and flint is never put in terms of sex and romance on either side but of whether they will be able to form a real partnership. it's good it's really good.

[sparvverius]

i also like the way that you can see eleanor's relationship with woodes rogers become and then cease to be a real partnership based on whether their vision of the relationship and their goals are in alignment

[creekfiend]

its so awkward when people ask me why i dropped out and i have to be like "inadequate disability support" bc no one wants to hear this. they're always like i thought they had to provide that though isn't it the law? girl you might want to sit down i have some bad news about the litigation-based enforcement of the americans with disabilities act

then if i do say that theyre like, couldnt you sue? well theoretically maybe but not without spending more money than i have and putting myself through absolute hell. so no. no i can't.

[mabelsguidetolife]

it’s just this

[creekfiend]

What's your grand unifying theory of fairies?

my grand unifying theory of fairies is a theory about all of the things humans have typically historically found extremely compelling and infuriatingly impossible to grasp, basically. death is my best example. humans are very good thinkers and we have the ability to understand a lot of things, but as animals we have pretty limited perceptions of the world. the world exists in such a way that our ability to fully perceive it will never like... match up to Reality. does this make sense. we only have a limited number of senses and our cognition is limited as well. there is a ceiling of understanding for us an organisms. but we are thinkers and our survival has typically depended on analyzing and trying to understand the phenomena around us! so the things we cannot fully comprehend become these little planets that we orbit around psychologically.

when I say something is a fairy, what I mean is that fairy is a explanation for the psychological significance of something we as human beings can't really fathom. I made a list (non-exhaustive of course) of them last night but here are some if you missed it: death, grief, childhood/adolescence, the Self, romance/attraction of any sort, sex, reproduction, violence, natural disasters, illness/disease, trauma, alien encounters, missing persons cases, etc etc. Conrad wisely observed that the concept of "fairies" as I define them here is ITSELF a fairy. Which is both true and very satisfying to think about imo.

some of these things are like, arguably explicable (we can for example intellectually understand why a given illness happens,) but between that theoretical intellectual knowledge and the impact that it has on us to experience it, there is a gap. and that gap is a fairy!

humans typically come up with psychological scaffolding to explain fairies away such that we can comfortably pack them into a box in our heads and not be utterly existentially overwhelmed by them all of the time. this is why e.g. religion/spirituality is evolutionarily adaptive, I think.

I think that BECAUSE we cannot fully comprehend or explain these things, the only way we can communicate about them is to just say what encountering them feels like. and that! gap! is the fairy. the gap between the reality that we cannot comprehend, and the description of the experience of encountering it.

my theory is that a lot of the realities of existing as an alive organism are so inherently traumatic that comprehension, or even acceptance of our lack of comprehension, would be detrimental to our ability to stay alive in a day to day moment to moment way. one of the reasons I think this is because the people who think about this sort of thing a lot (me) tend to be VERY BAD at participating in expected human social structures, lmao. I think probably we all exist on a spectrum of Obsessed With Fairies and I am definitely on the very far end of it. some people are just obsessed with finding ways to describe the experience of grappling with the unknowable, or obsessed with finding models to communicate phenomena we do not have an immediate understanding of. that's why you get Thinkers, I think. philosophers and stuff.

the society I live in (and probably most of not all of you as well) is one that is particularly intent to deny the existence of or flatten/simplify fairies. I think this is bad for us because I think we need social support structures for grappling with these things because they're scary. things we cannot fully understand are scary. we need to admit that the fairies are real and be able to talk about them like they're important and not be treated like we are crazy and isolated socially for it.

there is probably some phrase or term for this in specific academic philosophy fields but I don't have access to that stuff so I made my own out of dirt and sticks.

ok I have to go to the doctor now

[chainmail-butch]

Hi, its me. The warmest creature in the world. I love you. Im the warmest creature in the world and I love you so much and I need to be in your lap right now. Yes, I know about the heat wave. That's okay though because I was already the warmest creature in the world so I don't mind. I love you and you need to let me sleep in your lap right now. I'm soooo warm and I love you sooo much. If you say no you'll be saying no to a thing that love you. Let me sleep in your lap. When I fall asleep I get warmer. I love you

[pankendev]

there are places in the world today that are experiencing 40°C for the first time in recorded history. of course there's no way to know whether chucking billionaires into volcanos will appease the sun god but i feel we're doing the scientific method a disservice if we don't at least try

[autogynophelia]

A lot of transphobia has this underlying assumption that people who transition are a random sample from their AGAB. Like, if you imagine a world where you took all the 10-year-old "boys" in your country and randomly selected 1% of them to go on to transition later in life, then that world would be essentially the same as this one.

And that assumption is useful to transphobes because it means they can uncritically extend properties of the AGAB group to the subset who transitions. E.g. they will say AMAB kids are likely to have behaved like X or experienced Y in their youth, therefore trans women are likely to have behaved like X or experienced Y in their youth. And they can say this without ever checking if it's true about trans women, because if everyone knows it's true of cis boys, they will assume that extension to trans women.

But like, if you took down the details of every 30-year-old trans woman right now, then went back in time 20 years, and studied that group of 10-year-olds, you would find they already had properties that differed from the 10-year-old-AMAB average in 2006. Perhaps they would be a little quieter, perhaps they would have a couple more female friends, perhaps they'd have fewer friends in general, perhaps they would have more anxiety, perhaps they would have more depression. Perhaps none of these and something else, idk.

But, the point is, people don't just decide to transition *at random*, there is a whole history of life experience in each trans girl leading up to that realisation "I am trans" and that decision "I should do something about it", and that common history of all these kids would be reflected in some group average differences from the AGAB cohort even long before that realisation took place.

And this is what makes "male socialisation" rhetoric so frustrating. Because the very fact of having all the life history that led up to your realisation that you were trans, the life history that *caused* that realisation, that very history marks you as someone with an atypical social experience compared to your AGAB average.

Literally if you had to select the 1% of AMAB people *least* likely to have had a typical "male socialisation", it would be the ones who come out of that experience thinking "you know what, I'm actually a different gender to all these men". And yet it's trans women who are tarred with the brush of "male socialisation" more than any other group.

[figs-and-cigs]

There's something so magical about feeling yourself falling in love with someone new and then getting to come home and tell my husband whom I love so dearly, all the bubbling excited details.