Bitches!!! Several co-workers and I all just left a very unhealthy job (at least 5 of us all left lol). I sent your article ‘The Resignation Checklist’ around to everyone before we did. This is a message my co-worker sent me- she went over the checklist and realized she had PTO that wouldn’t have paid out and used it before she left!!! I used the checklist myself and before I left: quit at the beginning of the month to get an extra month of insurance, am going for a physical and dental cleaning, went and got an eye exam and new glasses through my vision insurance, made sure my 401k was vested, and redeemed some company rewards points for a gift card! I especially would never have thought about new glasses without your list and am so excited for them. Just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate you and that your article was a hit with my work friends- thank you!!! <3
OH HONEY!!!! Damn this brings tears to our eyes. We're so thrilled for you and your coworkers!!! It's a huge honor to know that we helped you guys out in your quitting journey.
For everyone who still needs it, here's our resignation checklist:
The Resignation Checklist: 25 Sneaky Ways To Bleed Your Employer Dry Before Quitting
There's this category of TTRPG where the seemingly only selling point besides maybe artwork is giving players permission to jerk off to their own moral purity as manifest from buying the TTRPG.
Candela Obscura is the strawman put forward in this post, but it’s a game that actually exists:
[This was partially written by @ashweather, another member of the A.N.I.M. team.]
Let me preface this by saying that I don’t think that the makers of Candela Obscura are morally evil, or that I think less of your moral worth if you’ve played or enjoyed this game. It’s just that, at best, the game has a really obnoxious and cowardly tone and at worst has a lot of shit in it that looks really bad if you think about it for more than 5 seconds.
If you think that tabletop RPGS are art (and we do), then they can be analyzed like art. They can have unfortunate implications or reflect unexamined reactionary politics. This post is going to be taking screenshots from both the quick start guide and the full rulebook to make this point - while the text between the two is broadly similar, the quickstart guide is more overtly finger-wagging and hostile, saying the quiet part out loud.
The thing about Candela Obscura is that it takes place in a fantasy 19th-century England/USA, but it really wants to pretend that it doesn’t. It wants the aesthetics of this setting and almost every trope that comes baked into it, but also wants to act like it’s above all that. It wants to have its cake and denounce it too. It’s so pants-shittingly terrified that it or the players might say or do something “problematic” that it loops back around to being incredibly offensive.
To take just a few examples, the text is absolutely riddled with this kind of sentiment:
(What the fuck do they think an “explorer” is? Also, I think I have some bad news about 19th century doctors.)
Okay. Look. A lot of this is gesturing at principles that are unobjectionable or even useful to keep in mind when writing a setting like this. Yes, it’s ideal to have a non-Eurocentric historical understanding of technology and culture. Yes, refugees are human beings with their own valuable skills and perspectives. Yes, if you uncritically write an expy of Victorian England or late 19th-century New England, you’re gonna end up with a bunch of insane stereotypes (especially Orientalist ones) that you probably shouldn’t just blithely put to the page without thinking about them. And yes, bigotry is a bad thing, obviously.
The problem is twofold: The first is that Candela Obscura feels the need to take a patronizing tone towards its own readers, as though they were incapable of engaging critically with the setting or subject matter on their own terms. The second is that despite all of this finger-wagging, Candela Obscura absolutely does not present a setting with any critical thinking put into its basic construction. (We checked, by the way. None of what we are about to present is supposed to be in-universe propaganda. If it is intended to be, this is not made clear at all in the text itself.)
The game takes place primarily in the city of Newfaire and its surrounding environs - the Fairelands. The Fairelands are prosperous and idyllic, and all but outright stated to be “the good guys.” All of the “problematic” aspects of the societies the game is emulating are either scrubbed without thinking about the implications of scrubbing them..
(Don’t worry guys there’s no colonialism here, this version of fantastical New York was settled on a Terra Nullius where nobody lived, right over the ruins of an ancient society with a mix of Egyptian and Mesoamerican coding who practiced strange and corruptive magicks. Remember, reader, this game wants you to go out of your way to avoid reproducing any harmful stereotypes from the era.)
..or are present without any historical or structural reasons for them to be present:
(Don’t worry guys, sex work is lawful, profitable, safe, and socially acceptable! Oh yeah all the sex work happens in shady, spooky-looking crime districts that cops monitor, filled with drug-filled dens of illegal vice, though. By the way, there is no brothel listed in this district’s points of interests, or any further discussion of what sex work in Newfaire is actually like.)
There are so many examples of this that we could spill a novel’s worth of digital ink talking about it. (We just don’t have time to get into, for instance, their adventure inspired by the “radium girls” where the primary victim of the dangerous substance in question is a customer who is already dead when the adventure starts and not the workers who make the products.) Honestly though, this paragraph says more than we could in a hundred pages:
Here we find out that we are reading a TTRPG setting that has the same understanding of bigotry as the movie Crash. No institutionalized bigotry, just “bad actors who hold terrible beliefs.” Just bad apples, with no personal history or cultural roots to their ideas, who presumably sprung out of the ground one day declaring themselves Republicans. Not only do these bad actors come from nowhere, they don’t go anywhere either. They don’t belong to any social movements, they don’t get organized, they don’t push for regressive political changes, and if they ever do, they certainly never succeed at those goals.
You see, despite these bad apples, the soil they grew from is pure. And you know something else about the idyllic, almost utopian Fairelands? They’re under assault.
That’s right! Hale (which the Fairelands is a part of) is under assault from the dastardly, corruptive forces of… uh, “Otherwhere.” (Yeah, do they all have hooked noses and recessed chins too?) That’s where all of the dirty foreigners invaders come from, who want to take away the prosperity of the Fairelands!
Oh, or maybe their whole culture were all coerced into doing it by an evil rock or something, which is definitely less xenophobic. But whatever, who cares what the reasons were. The Fairelands are under attack, and as the dominant power in the world, they need to defend themselves. Against the “colonists.” With nukes chain lightning.
(That last sentence continues on “tens of thousands..” You get the picture.) So, whew, glad that’s over! Otherwhere is still really dangerous, though. They might even be developing weapons of mass destruction of their own:
You know, if Candela Obscura were a person, I have a feeling I wouldn’t want to hear its thoughts on Israel.
You might be asking, where do the PCs fit in this? Well. The PCs are members of the in-universe organization Candela Obscura. They are an enormously powerful and widespread secret society of sometimes-cops sometimes-vigilantes who fight against the corruptive forces of magick to keep humanity safe. They keep dark secrets, “perform questionable acts in the name of the common good,” and operate entirely without oversight or responsibilities to anyone other than this organization. We are assured that this organization has the best interests of the regions they operate in and of all humanity in mind.
It’s actually fine - cool, even! - that PCs are secret police/CIA agents who engage in morally dubious acts for the purported common good. Newfaire’s society being deeply flawed is fine! The Fairelands as a political entity furthering an explicit narrative of being persecuted is fine! The problem is not that any of these elements exist, the problem is that Candela Obscura is utterly allergic to examining them. The text seemingly does not understand the setting it has presented at all.
The game wants to be anti-conservative, but the only kind of story it can produce is one of heroes who are ultimately aligned with the dominant power of the world, preserving the good and righteous status quo by fighting against corruptive, foreign, magical forces. “Gay transgender women of all races can be holy knights secret police fighting to protect the good kingdom democracy from the endless hordes of the evil dark race that has threatened its borders for a thousand in recent years!”
On a first read a while back, I said Candela Obscura’s gameplay mechanics make it sound like a game more meant to create “actual-play” shows than to be actually played. On examining the text more closely, that’s more true than I even realized at the time. The reason the game has all these bits about how not to be problematic - all of these instructions for avoiding engaging with the more controversial aspects of the setting - is because it’s not really intended as a game to be played in a private environment. It’s intended as brand guidelines for putting on an actual play show. If you google Candela Obscura, the IMBD page for the actual play series appears before the store page for the rulebook.
It seems like the game really doesn’t want you to play a character outside of your own culture. And sure, as stated earlier, it is a good idea not to have a mysticized idea of other cultures, or represent them in a callous way. For a private game played at home, though, this is not really something you need to dedicate pages accounting for. Nobody outside the table has to hear a poorly-done accent or contend with a less-than-perfectly researched religious portrayal - and if there is a pervasive issue with someone being bigoted or leaning on stereotypes at the table, frankly, that is a problem that is outside the scope of a TTRPG to address.
However, if you are an actor on a show, portraying people from different cultures comes with a whole different set of (much more justified) baggage. Candela Obscura’s approach to player attitudes on the setting makes so much more sense as brand guidelines than it does as a codification of how to play a game. "Don’t have actors appear in insensitive costumes on camera." "Don’t have actors say foreign words they don’t know how to pronounce on camera." "Remember not to have your white actor do a Romani 'fortune-telling' scene on camera." "Don’t show anything that could negatively affect the perception of the brand."
We’d like to end this by contrasting this attitude with Coyote & Crow, a game made by indigenous Americans, and one that is also actually meant to be played. Coyote & Crow invites all players to (respectfully, in good faith) create characters from indigenous cultures. The creators have challenged those who avoid their game on the basis that “they don’t want to be disrespectful by playing it” because that would involve portraying a Native character - in the end, who is that helping? That attitude results in potential players who remain just as ignorant of Native American cultures and - more importantly - don’t buy or support their game!
friend of mine recommended a video essay that's like 5 hours long about why it's currently a whole Thing for fascists to claim they only eat meat and demonize vegetables etc etc, and it's genuinely quite well researched in many places and contains some fascinating history and has made me feel very weird about my status as an adult who enjoys drinking milk. but I've not finished it and I genuinely don't know if I will because at one point the ol' "you can't say you care about animals and also eat animals" chestnut got dropped by the white vegan essayist and it put such a bad taste in my mouth that I had to leave instantly
like idk man it just feels genuinely parodic to dedicate hours to analyzing how foodways have frequently been used as white supremacist propaganda and then casually toss out an argument that pretty invariably demonizes indigenous hunting practices with 0 regard for traditional knowledge and land stewardship guiding those practices
Every time I hear a white vegan say that I want to throw the rubble of the Klamath Dams at them.
The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.
The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.
There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.
The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.
I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.
#also do you have any idea how much conservation is funded by people who want to eat those animals#at least in the us anytime someone buys ammo or hunting equipment or hunting licenses that money goes directly to state wildlife agencies
I know i've said it before, but if you are concerned it could be real and not a scam, the best way to avoid getting scammed is to return contact separately.
Here's how that works:
say you get a text from your internet provider, let's say it's Comcast (whom i hate). So you have this text that says it's from Comcast about your bill with a contact number and a clickable link -- could be real, could be a scam.
Don't touch anything about this text. Open a web browser and look up the customer service number for Comcast. Or get the number from the bill they send you. However you do it, get the contact info for Comcast from a trusted source, like an official phone directory or the Comcast website itself.
Get in touch with them using that information.
So. Let's run the example both ways it could go.
If it IS a scam: you reach out to Comcast and tell them you were contacted about a problem with your bill, they look you up in their customer database, and they tell you there is no problem with your bill.
If it's NOT a scam, you do the same thing, they look you up, and they explain the problem. In this case, neither Comcast nor the employees involved give a single shit whether or not you clicked the link in the text vs. going through their official website.
This works the same for the your bank, the IRS, Amazon, political causes, charities, everything.
By handling any questionable incoming calls to action this way, you significantly protect yourself from scams and malware and shit
for the lovely lovely deafies out there who want to get involved in direct action you absolutely 100% cannot ever bring a hearing aid or cochlear implant with bluetooth to any direct action. bluetooth devices all carry a unique signal that can be used to identify you if it's picked up at a direct action. go with a [more] hearing buddy and communicate in sign language. if you don't mutually know a sign language then come up with gestures. do not risk your freedom because you want to have your hearing aid/cochlear implant at the action. it's not worth it.
flock cameras are also now tracking bluetooth device signatures when you pass them. if you drive past a flock camera with your bluetooth-enabled hearing aid or cochlear implant, the flock camera knows you passed through
oopsie i tripped and spilled my link to archive dot org's downloadable copy of Microsoft office suite for 2007, which features no AI tools and is a powerful word processor that still holds up just fine on windows 10!
I truly enjoy how much Animorphs is like “here are our young heroes, each with a distinctive trope to fill in the group!” And then it makes you watch how the pressure of each person’s role grinds them to dust. And also they have homework.
#IM SORRY THEY DO HOME FUCKING WORK IN ANIMORPHS??????
Yeah they're students. If they don't keep their grades up or if they miss too many classes (or miss classes at suspicious times) then they risk drawing the attention of the faculty and/or their parents, some of whom are the enemy and some of whom can just make future espionage a whole lot harder. There are multiple missions where they're like "okay, this is incredibly time sensitive but it'll take a full day or longer so it has to wait for the weekend and we'll have to all lie to our parents about sleeping over at each others' houses. It's gonna have to be done at the last minute because we've gotta go to class. Also, remember to get that English paper finished, we can NOT afford to have you grounded right now."
These have been out of print for an age, and the authors have given their blessings to share the PDFs. Here's everything, including companion/side books and the non-canon Alternamorphs books, in reading order:
All of the Animorphs books by K. A. Applegate, as well as the other books set in that universe. I got them here. I am not the one who collec
Let the historical record show that Mr. Beast was entirely ignorable if you were just like doing literally anything else. I've been on youtube as long as it's been around and I've never been recommended a video by him. I see him in passing as a meme. I thought he was a made up joke, a caricature of bad youtuber content miners until someone I trust confirmed his existence to me in late 2025.
on the one hand i agree but on the other it doesn’t fucking matter. you think what you do has meaning? you think that convincing a single person to stop buying Harry Potter merch achieves anything? it doesn’t. the world operates on such an astronomically large scale that no individual action can actually effect it. you convince that guy; another million guys fill his place.
The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.
Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.
#I just started dropping '2.5 Billion page views a month'#into conversations as early as possible bc they would Not believe me otherwise#it was right up there with having to say 'csam attacks' to get them to take my compartmentalization of information concerns seriously#turns out those are the magic words#otw#op
The last part was kind of insane, honestly. When we started changing platforms for the donor database, I kept telling them that yes I was aware we already had an account for the volunteer database, and no that could not be connected to the donor database. And they said yes fine sure and then connected them anyway. And I called them back and said, excuse me, I'm confused, I can see both databases. And they said, well, yeah, but it's only you, someone has to be able to see both databases to give other users access. The other users can't see both. And I said, no, we have been asking for a completely separate database. I should not be able to see both. And they said, you are one organization, one organization can't have two databases. And I said, last year someone used our volunteer email list to commit approximately one thousand felonies. Please feel free to imagine how much worse it could have been had they had a way to use volunteers' email addresses to get their legal names. We do not want this to be something anyone can do no matter how much we trust them. Let me describe those felonies to you in more detail. And they emailed me two hours later and said, you can have two separate databases.
to be seen on social media, fitness instructors basically always have to have contemporarily attractive body types. whereas fitness instructors you meet in real life have a huge variety of body types.
being a well-qualified fitness instructor requires education and experience and yes, usually a significant level of fitness, be that strength, flexibility, stamina, so on.
Many people have all of those qualifications, while also being fat.
Perhaps the biggest lie advertising has sold you is that being "fit" means being thin. That is spectacularly untrue. The world is filled with fat athletes, amateur, professional, in all variety of sports, performing remarkable feats any of us would be damn proud to accomplish. That's a hell of a lot of experience and talent, including many educators you or I would be lucky to learn from.
we need to bring back public hatred for paparazzi. I’m so tired of actors defending themselves against assholes with cameras and being smeared as egotistical divas. they’re glorified stalkers who get paid to harass people. end of. the things these freaks get away with would send normal people to prison but we’re supposed to think it’s okay just bc they’re paparazzi. they SHOULD get shut down for being openly misogynistic. they SHOULD get told off and reported for following someone to their private residence to doxx them. they SHOULD face charges for just about running people over in their pursuit of the next hot celeb. this is not normal. and, actually, these people DO deserve to get punched sometimes.
when i was a kid i was so mad all the time bc i thought someday i'd have to be somebody's wife i didn't know it was optional. is everybody reminding the young girls in their lives that it's optional.
is wanting to be a wife and mother a requirement for being a woman?
why might OP be annoyed with replies assuming that this post is about being aroace or transmasc if a woman doesn’t want to be a wife or mother?
are there reasons unrelated to sexuality and romantic interest that might make a woman not want to be a wife or mother?
are there reasons unrelated to gender identity and expression that might make a woman not want to be a wife and mother?
core concept: what is gender essentialism?
is it gender essentialism to imply that all women inherently want to be wives and mothers? could this be what OP is critiquing?
look at the notes OP responds to. is it gender essentialism to imply that being a wife and mother is so affixed to womanhood that to not want to be those things means you’re incapable of sexual/romantic feelings, or not a woman?
what trait are you perpetuating when you assume that women who do not want to be wives and mothers must be aroace or trans? is it gender essentialism?
After working in a place where people often asked questions answered by signs, I find it to be the case that when a person is in a new place, there is a lot of stimuli to take in, so the sign has to be of a certain size, obviousness, and recognizability to be quickly separated out from the other visual noise.
reminder that the books themselves also suck ass actually. there's an entire plotline endorsing slavery. the one character who advocates to end slavery is bullied and made fun of. the one slave who doesnt like being enslaved is bullied and treated as an outcast. the bankers are the picture of racist stereotypes of jewish people. the one asian character is named fckn Cho Chang. the worldbuilding SUCKS. fuck harry potter and fuck rowling. stop giving her your money.
another huge piece of advice: separate out 'tidying', 'cleaning' and 'organising' in your head. they're not the same thing and a lot of paralysis and overload comes from either misidentifying what your space needs, or trying to do all of them at once with conflicting goals.
TIDYING means clearing space, making your environment orderly and inviting. it usually entails removing clutter from surfaces, clearing the floor so you can move around easily, and creating psychological ease by putting everything visibly in its place. It's very visual, and can also involve things like straightening picture frames, squaring pillows, folding blankets on the couch, etc. It reduces chaos and noise and makes a space comfortable.
ORGANISING means sifting through belongings, ensuring that what doesn't need to be kept is thrown out and what does need to be kept is kept well. This often means categorising by room and function – teaspoons go in the teaspoon drawer, and the teaspoon drawer stays in the kitchen. It can also mean indexing things so you can find them easily (markers sorted by colour, paperwork divided into topical folders, books alphabetised) and preserving things (moving photos out of direct sunlight, keeping open flour in a sealed container, sleeving trading cards).
CLEANING means removing built up dirt, dust and grime, reducing the level of environmental contaminants and making your space sanitary. Bacteria are a fact of life, they love to hang out in dust and cling to pet hair and multiply on any given surface. Cleaning is how you keep that stuff in check, preventing it from building up to the point it affects your health. This means wiping frequently touched surfaces with disinfectant, sanitising utensils (doing the dishes), washing bedding and clothes (and yourself), and sweeping/vacuuming and taking out the trash to physically remove dirt from your home.
Tidying is not the same thing as organising – shove the mail, bills, dirty teaspoons and your gardening gloves in a drawer, and you've tidied the table. Sort the paperwork into piles by deadline, put the teaspoons in a cup, and roll the gloves together so they don't get separated, and the table is untidy but organised.
Similarly, a tidy or organised space can still be filthy. Just because all the yellowed newspapers and trash bags are sorted by date in the basement, out of sight, doesn't mean they're clean. A chaotic, cluttered space can still be very sanitary if it's being kept clear of refuse, and wiped and dusted often.
Sometimes tidying makes your space less organised, and vice versa. Organising often shakes out a lot of dust and makes the space dirtier. The classic "it's even worse than when I started" feeling is often the result of going into a room with the intent of tidying, then actually starting the task of organising instead. It's a lot easier to tidy an organised space, and organising first is usually the right instinct, but the distinction isn't intuitive so the sudden cluttering effect can be really demoralising. Remember they're three different things with different goals. Sometimes they overlap, but sometimes they conflict. That doesn't mean you're doing it wrong.
