An Insufficient Number of Kittens

[kittenwriter]

This guy loves making generalizations

Which guy would that be and what generalizations?

[itastelikesand]

[emortal-l-deactivated20250308]

[ID: a screenshot of a comic speech bubble. The black text in it reads "No matter how open-minded, socially conscious, anti-racist I think I am, I still have old learned hidden biases that I need to examine. It is my responsibility to check myself daily for my stereotypes, prejudices and, ultimately, discrimination." /ID end]

[anarchistmemedistro]

[pupucino]

antiracism is a constant process. i was raised in a racist village and it's not easy to get rid of it. i moved away over 10 years ago but those ideas are still haunting me.

[genderkoolaid]

also keep in mind that shame + guilt are not conducive to growing as a person. when it comes to "checking yourself" it should be a non-judgemental process. it's not about flagellating yourself for every bad thought or trying to purify your mind of all corruption. it's only when acknowledging your own racist thoughts doesn't fill you with dread that you can really progress past the white guilt of it all.

radical self-acceptance & genuine self-critique are not opposites. they need each other. do not let obsessive-compulsive behaviors colonize your desire to grow as a person.

[kittenwriter]

The thing is, most people who use "antiracism" and champion it as a concept are really into flagellating. Just look at White Fragility, a book that is frequently recommended and heavily worshiped among the antiracism community: she actually says outright at one point that when people come up to her at the antiracism workshops she's running and ask her for practical ways they can help, that's an excuse to avoid sitting with their guilt and doing internal work and she tells them as much. (And she describes precisely one of her own mistakes in order to discuss the extremely self-flagellating way she responds to realizing she's been rude to the Black IT person at work.)

Shame and guilt are not conducive to growing as a person and not conducive to accomplishing anything. Unfortunately there's a very large chunk of the movement that is running around telling people they need to purify their minds of corruption; I would even say it's the majority of the mainstream antiracism movement.

(If anyone's looking for a book that deals with working on your biases without falling into "You should feel guilty about everything!", check out Debby Irving's Waking Up White, which details her journey to racial consciousness. Including unflinchingly describing a lot of her cringe-inducing early mistakes and how she's learned from them without any kind of flagellating over it, despite the fact that some of them are really cringe-inducing, with "you will make mistakes and you will also improve" being a big part of the messaging.)

[thebibliosphere]

Every so often I catch a glimpse of the book drama going on over on the Insta/Threads sphere of the Internet, and it makes me so glad I’m considered too Tumblrina to sit at their tables.

What do you mean an author is railing against people using libraries/the Libby app because it’s “free” (it’s not. you as the author get money from the library purchasing the digital lending license) and meanwhile their book is on Amazon for free to try and get readers??? Hello????

[thebibliosphere]

“But if people read it for free they might like it want to buy the rest of my work!”

You mean like how people read books at libraries, and end up buying them if they like them?

“That’s not the same 😡”

Correct! Because again, libraries pay us. You putting your books up on Amazon for free means you get nothing.

[thebookewyrme]

I am staring directly into the camera like I’m on the Office in Librarian. Libraries are literally an author’s best friend. We get books to people they never would have known about otherwise, & create Fans out of disinterested bystanders. And! Libraries are often paying MORE for a book than the average user, at least for digital editions, because it is expected that the library will lend it to more people, so theoretically we need to pay more to compensate the authors! (This is not I think how it works in practice, it more often just benefits the digital lending company instead of the actual author but. Greed is ever thus). Also, in some countries (sadly not the US, boo hiss) authors get paid for every checkout of a book. So, you can literally get royalties on those “free” books. (Also, they’re not free, they’re paid for with tax dollars for the good of everyone). How some fool can think temporary freeness on Amazon Kindle is superior to libraries I cannot fathom. Like, how does this person even manage to function in the real world?

Anyway. Authors. Love your librarians. We love you and seek only to help you get more readers so you can write more books. We have a symbiotic relationship, each needs the other.

[thebibliosphere]

#I thought if you were self pubed#you basically couldn't get into the library#sounds like being mad at a club#that won't let them in

Just saw this in my notes and thought I'd reply. You can't get into libraries if you only use Amazon, but platforms like Draft2Digital, Ingram and Kobo Writing Life make it possible for self-pub authors to have their work made available to libraries across the global network.

You're sometimes more likely to get picked up by libraries if you list yourself as having a publisher, but as a self-pub author you can do that by registering as an LLC (which for me was $250 back in 2020, I don't know what it is now) and then listing the name you used as the publisher. But even that's becoming an unnecessary step with how prominent self-pub has become.

Really at this stage, this person is shooting themselves in the foot by opting to remain an Amazon exclusive author and being a twit about it on main, but that's their hill. They can die on it.

[myfootyrthroat]

When the health food store unionized, something wild happened that I thought was just a goofy one-off, but makes more sense now.

There was a big push to eliminate "degrading jobs" but the strategy was to eliminate the position, then create a new position outside of the bargaining unit to do the work. So like, we wouldn't have dishwashers, but we'd have people who washed dishes that weren't eligible to be in the union.

I was like A) what the actual fuck? Dish washing isn't "degrading", it's fucking vital. B) What the actual fuck? You want to create a union just to exploit different people?

There were enough of us to be like "Absolutely the fuck not," and put a stop to it, but I was absolutely flummoxed that people involved in a union would say that out loud. Working with more leftists now, it makes sense.

[myfootyrthroat]

I think it was coming from a background that viewed labor as necessary to accomplish anything, but advocated for the equitable distribution of the gains made by labor... and then being thrown in with people who just thought labor was icky.

The first time someone told me that busing tables was "degrading", I was like "Oh, uhh, yeah, like it's very necessary work but under compensated for how vital it is?" and they responded "No, touching plates that other people have eaten off of is disgusting."

But I want to eat off of clean plates. So somebody is going to have to touch/clean those plates. And I respect that person and want them to be able to afford to live.

[official-torfmoor]

Those people sound like a guy I'd make up to be mad at.

[myfootyrthroat]

I mean, that job definitely had a Truman Show vibe. If they hadn't been in-person interactions, I'd think I was getting trolled.

[myfootyrthroat]

Just to put a bow on it:

In bargaining, someone on the Union side suggested that we eliminate all the cashiers and exclusively use self-checkouts (they were a cashier and didn't like it). The organizer told them that the union wasn't in the habit of eliminating bargaining unit positions. (This is the same person I've talked about how said that "as a prison abolitionist" we just needed to execute most criminals.)

When I explained holiday scheduling (time off requests granted in order of seniority, shifts assigned in reverse order of seniority). Someone was angry and said that time off requests potentially being denied "wasn't in the spirit of the union". When I pointed out that our departments made like 30% of our annual revenue between Thanksgiving and New Years and that required production staff to be working, they said that we just needed to create a class of positions ineligible for the bargaining unit that wouldn't be able to request time off. (Which again, most of us figured we'd just rotate holidays or something, but assumed that some holiday production was mandatory.)

[bees-and-mice-and-frogs-and]

I was on leftie tiktok (as a creator) for a bit and I saw this attitude there as well. I specifically remember one argument around cleaners where someone said that employing a cleaner was, like, ethically bad, and that "after the revolution" we wouldn't have cleaners.

It got me thinking, along with Ann Russell talking about how to treat cleaners (being a cleaner herself), about how we conceptualise domestic service as particularly degrading in all its forms, when, really, why is that? Why is paying someone to do something intrinsically bad?

Like, even in a moneyless, gift economy society, there would still be people whose primary contribution to their communities would be cleaning. Some people like to clean, and are really rather good at it.

I've talked ad nauseam in the past about how British attitudes towards cleaners and other service based positions today are the descendants of Victorian attitudes. That is, both the attitudes of conservatives and many progressives of that time. The trade union movement was particularly exclusionary towards service workers.

I think people on the left thinking about forms of labour can sometimes be worse than people on the right. People who have taken these positions generally just conceptualise them as something you need to do to get by, and there are particular employers where these positions are degrading but in general the jobs themselves aren't.

[myfootyrthroat]

Yeah, that really sums it up. There's stuff that needs to get done, so I'll never be of the opinion that it's degrading work. I worked in kitchens for a long time, and every other position is reliant on having clean dishes, so nobody can really be "above" washing dishes. The shitty thing about washing dishes or busing tables is how people treat the people doing it. The work itself is vital.

And some of those jobs are like, sure, you can throw almost any warm body at it and get it done adequately, but you still run into people where you're like "Holy shit, you're good at this."

[leebrontide]

People doing a job most people don't want to do should be paid MORE in order to get people to do it. That's how it would work if we weren't mired in a schema assuming that less-frequently-desired jobs are the province of people who "can't do better" and "deserve" poverty because they have less value as people.

[toreblogallthethings]

Peer reviewing the tags: #these attitudes are also why ppl are weird about sex work#and weirdly enough visibly disabled people working - like esp thinking of like#places that employ ppl w LDs as workers and volunteers#what they FEEL is 'these people make me uncomfortable'#and they say 'they shouldn't have to do that'#so the solution is. no visibly disabled people getting to work#the fact that. they want to work. and want jobs#is irrelevant#too many people base their politics off their like. gut feelings of discomfort and unease#which are completely disconnected from both practicality and actual morality

[kittenwriter]

The problem with sheltered workshops isn't that the people they employ are working, it's that the people they employ are exempt from minimum wage because of their disabilities and are therefore being exploited. But the exploitation isn't in the fact of the work; it's in the lack of compensation for it, and far too many leftists don't grasp that.

[lastoneout]

"I am not a vessel for your good intent" goes hard as a line from a disabled perspective. Abled people care so much more about being their idea of a good ally than they do actually being a good ally. They shove their good intent right down your throat and then act surprised when you tell them they're suffocating you.

[lastoneout]

[faggotvampires]

[ID: An image of a sign with a blue background and with a graphic of a stick figure in a wheelchair at the beginning, resembling disabled parking space signs. The text below the stick figure reads "I am not a vessel for your good intent." /ID]

[kittenwriter]

One of the things I liked in MythQuest was that something along these lines gets explicitly discussed after it became clear that Max Asher was getting sick with something-- Cleo (a wheelchair user) expresses sympathy with him wanting people to ignore it and then later explains to her brother that being assisted even when you didn't ask it is uncomfortable.

[digitaldiscipline]

This is the 85 year old creator of Roger Rabbit:

[heyfruitcake]

Now that everyone is discussing Nolan's Odyssey movie, I feel like it's a good time to let non-Italians know that the production dumped plastic props into the Italian sea. Weirdly enough I could not find any article in English about it but it's a fucking problem nonetheless.

I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.

L'Odissea di Nolan tra "scheletri spazzatura" e relitti: Arpa al lavoro in Sicilia, che succede

Non è la prima volta che la produzione solleva un vespaio in Sicilia. A Lipari una squadra di sub sarebbe però già impegnata a bonificare i

[ignitelimelight]

They dumped plastic skeletons in environmentally protected areas, against the literal contracts they had to sign to get the permits to film in environmentally protected areas. Like they not only did a bad ecological thing that freaked out some divers, they literally broke environmental protection laws and their contract with the Italian government

[ryan-sometimes]

One of my favorite things about having a degree in biochemistry is going undercover at a store like Sephora. I can read the composition of the cosmetics and actually understand them. There’s no words to describe how great it feels. It’s like being in on an inside joke or secret

[ryan-sometimes]

The main thing I observe is that a lot of employees recommend makeup that is chemically incompatible. For example, if you ask them to recommend you a foundation and concealer, a lot of times they’ll pick two products that are chemically immiscible, so they’ll NEVER blend together successfully.

Generally foundation/concealer is either water or silicone based. There are upsides to each based on your needs. However, water and silicone are immiscible, and so if your foundation is water based but your concealer is silicone based, you will never get a good blend between these products. You’ll have to go back to switch to something that works.

[ryan-sometimes]

If you want to test for this in-store, mix the two on the back of your hand. If they form a uniform mixture, they’re miscible. If they separate, they’re chemically incompatible, and should not be used together. You can do this for any number of skin products. Primers, moisturizers, foundations, concealers, contour sticks, etc etc. Anything that comes in liquid or paste form.

You don’t need to understand all the chemicals on the label to run this experiment!

[nobrain-nothoughts]

As someone in pharmaceutical sciences I also experience similar things, so a hint from me: collagen is useless. In a cream it will not penetrate the skin, so doesn't do anything. As a food supplement, lemme tell you a secret: collagen is a protein. And when you eat protein, your stomach thinks its food and chops it up, so it can be used to make your own protein. Collagen is just expensive protein powder, and doesn't do anything meat or a veggie substitute does.

[plaguedocboi]

So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Conservation is so fucken sick

[onekisstotakewithme]

If the NCIS writers were funnier/smarter [pause to imagine a better world], I still think the funniest in-joke would’ve been having Allison Janney on the show for a mini-arc as a secret service agent and a Gibbs love interest.

[broadwaybaggins]

I have never watched a minute of NCIS but they SHOULD have done this, honestly.

[kittenwriter]

And the NCIS team even has a preexisting connection to the Secret Service; it would be so easy to either do it in the first two seasons with her coming to Kate for help with something, or coming in later because she needs to bring NCIS in on something and who better than Kate's old team.

[chutzpahchesed]

[lowhopes]

For us to share, cherish and remember, regardless of what others think about us. ✡️

[kittenwriter]

"Most leftists don't believe in banning books because they know the government shouldn't have that kind of authority."

...tell me you haven't interacted with many leftists without telling me you haven't interacted with many leftists.

(Most leftists are in fact totally fine with fascism as long as it's communist-flavored fascism. As a general rule, anyone making a big deal of distinguishing about "I'm a LEFTIST, not a LIBERAL" is someone to watch out for in this regard.)

[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]

[apilgrimpassingby]

My theory about these people (which isn't original to me) is both nicer and meaner.

They want to experience art the way they did when they were ten-year-olds: they didn't understand the political and philosophical implications, they didn't know who the writers/artists/actors/directors were or what they thought about politics, they just grasped the object-level plot and characters and the cool/funny/exciting/scary bits.

[kaleb-is-definitely-sane]

Also: “this piece of media is problematic” doesn’t mean “this piece of media should be burned”. It just means “we shouldn’t be uncritical when communing with media”

[kittenwriter]

I will believe it when I see it. Pretty much everyone I have seen use "this piece of media is problematic" has moved right on to "this piece of media should be burned and you should be burned for liking it" without pausing in between. I am suspicious of the "let's analyze everything" crowd because that crowd winds up calling Rebecca Sugar a Nazi for having her characters elect not to kill their enemies at the end of the story.

[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.

[irishironclad]

So actually if you really wanted to use your analysis skills you'd realize that what people are annoyed about is the implication that there's never a story or creative work they can create that can escape people like you attempting to assign political meaning to it when they just don't want that. That in fact people's presumptions about life are not, in fact, political (at best they are cultural, which is not an inherently facet of politics). And that by you people arrogantly pushing this idea you are intruding on the fact that a lot of people use fiction as escapism from politics and insisting that "urm no actually your favourite cartoon actually has politics cause no human being is 100% unbiased" is in fact, supremely fucking annoying

[tpwrtrmnky]

"Stop having fun wrong, it ruins my fun when you have fun wrong, it's not enough for me to just scroll past the analysis I don't like, if anyone anywhere is saying that the cartoon exists in a political context that's undermining my enjoyment of it!"

That's you. That's what you sound like.

[kittenwriter]

In my experience people who talk about analysis the way you're talking about it are the ones who move on to harassing the creator off the internet for clout, but go off, I guess.

[ms-demeanor]

As much as I understand and sympathize with your concerns, it's hard not to look at that entire list and not feel like it's being held up solely by Slippery Slope thinking. There's a lot of dangerous stuff going on in tech right now, but without some serious evidence the last thing anyone needs is fearmongering that makes it sound like lawmakers are so idiotic can't even, for example, ban CSAM without making it illegal to share ANY images online.

the last thing anyone needs is fearmongering that makes it sound like lawmakers are so idiotic can't even, for example, ban CSAM without making it illegal to share ANY images online.

I have extremely bad news for you about our lawmakers.

This is NOT a slippery slope argument, it is an argument with very clear precedents and lots of evidence of harm done. There isn't dangerous stuff going on in tech right now, there has been dangerous stuff going on in tech since "tech" has existed.

SESTA/FOSTA, passed by lawmakers to prevent human trafficking, is why it's so easy to get trans women on tumblr banned for posting 'mature content'. It has also made human trafficking worse, made sex work more dangerous, and sanitized the internet to the point that it's difficult to post photos of classical sculptures or instructions on how to perform a breast self-exam on most platforms.

The DMCA, passed by lawmakers to protect copyright holders online, is frequently used to censor criticism, cover up reporting on corporate malfeasance, and prevent buyers from having true ownership of digital purchases.

Lawmakers are CONSTANTLY attempting to use "But this would protect children/prevent the sharing of CSAM" to attack Section 230, a legal provision that prevents platforms from being held liable for the content they host. The proposed changes lawmakers idiotically present actually would drastically erode your ability to post ANY images online, would not make anyone safer, and would further consolidate the power held by platforms like Google and Meta while making it harder for smaller online platforms to exist.

The original sin of all of this (in the US at least) is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was passed in 1986 to regulate charges and sentences for computer-based crime and has been used since to prosecute security researchers and activists, and has been responsible for tremendously disproportionate sentences levied against people charged with computer-related crimes.

The people who write and pass laws about computers and the internet don't understand computers or the internet. The people who advocate for these kinds of laws either don't anticipate the second-order consequences or anticipated the consequences and wanted fallout like the sanitation of the internet or the criminalization of downloading journal articles.

I am not fearmongering, I am someone who has been aware of the disastrous outcomes of legislating the internet for decades pointing to the specific ways that the sorts of rules people are proposing have demonstrably been fucking people over forever.

[ms-demeanor]

I really really really want you to understand that any time someone says "there oughtta be a law" about regulating the internet you should immediately raise every possible red flag and investigate what they're proposing and what tech-literate people think about what they're proposing. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a wonderful resource for this, you should pay attention to the things they care about and advocate for because they are one of the best safeguards we have against dangerously uninformed legislation.

[ms-demeanor]

Call your reps and tell them you want them to vote against KOSA.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Who wants to hear a DIY tiling pro tip that the experts won't tell you

[hazelriver74]

Yes!

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Do not drop your phone into the bucket of tile adhesive. This step is actually completely unnecessary and massively complicates the tiling process.

[fueles]

You say this but my uncle is a tiler and he swears by the “drop phone in putty bucket” technique. I think you’re just posting this for clout

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Your uncle is caught up in a tradition that he was taught as an apprentice that he never questioned. Modern putty doesn't require phone, the formula has changed.

[perfectly-disfigured]

MY uncle says some customers still demand the phone putty technique because it "doesn't look right otherwise"

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Drop an empty phone case in and those customers can't tell the fucking difference because there is no fucking difference.

[lithiumdoll]

My mum renovated houses for thirty years, she says “you’re half right, but in some cases - particularly in houses built before 1930 - the phone does add some benefit. Could be a tablet too if you’ve an old one in the garage. And anyone who says it’s got to be a particular model is just being precious about it, whatever the forums say.”

[00venator]

IPhones and tablets where invented in 1898, what did they do before then?

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Nothing, tiles were invented in 1899.

[thesaltofcarthage]

my sister the historian studied ancient pompeiian tile mosiacs and there's definitely graffiti of dropping cans on strings into the buckets of putty, so it goes way back.

[pomrania]

“This reads like fanfiction (it feels like it was written by a preteen, and most of such things posted publicly are fanfic)” vs “This reads like fanfiction (it has a focus on character and relationships, like the style of a lot of modern fanfic)” vs “This reads like fanfiction (it keeps referencing people and events with the assumption that the audience is already familiar with them, like how fanfic doesn’t need to rehash the source material)”

[pomrania]

Some further suggestions from the notes:

“This reads like fanfiction (it’s a love story for the ages as long as you can overlook that the author keeps misspelling ‘you're’)” vs “This reads like fanfiction (you can tell the author was having a blast writing this and now so do you reading it)” vs “This reads like fanfiction (the author is clearly info-dumping about a very niche hobby of theirs that they’re passionate about)” vs “This reads like fanfiction (the characters keep getting put in increasingly weirder situations which you’d normally only find in fanfic)” vs “This reads like fanfiction (the author felt the need to rehash the characters from when they were first introduced instead of after several years’ worth of character growth)” vs “This reads like fanfiction (it feels like it had no editor)”

[ryanthedemiguy]

“This reads like fanfiction (I’m pretty sure I can identify the filed off serial numbers)”

[nyssaismyrealname]

“This reads like fanfiction (I have no idea what anyone looks like because the writer forgot to describe people when they replaced the character name with their new name).”