on the apps

[mediasideblog]

Here’s the cursed quodo post.

[horrortvfilmsource]

OBSESSION dir. Curry Barker, 2026

[mediasideblog]

#she was great in this #I wish they'd realised who the main character was when they were writing it

[mediasideblog]

[eroticcannibal]

MRI machines and cooling units and AC and IT systems in hospitals are breaking due to the heat. Lab equipment is failing. Some cancer treatments cannot be done due to machine failures. A&E overcrowding is worse due to heat related health issues and sheer amount of people is making the heat in hospitals worse (and the AC! Is breaking!) Patients with appointments are being advised to bring in "a lot" of water with them to be able to safely attend. Fans cannot be used in hospitals. Norwich has no functuoning MRI scanners right now. And the staff have to keep working through all of this, they are getting ill and sleep deprived which is compounding issues further. This is not normal 👍

[mediasideblog]

#we're spectacularly bad at weather

[mediasideblog]

[eroticcannibal]

MRI machines and cooling units and AC and IT systems in hospitals are breaking due to the heat. Lab equipment is failing. Some cancer treatments cannot be done due to machine failures. A&E overcrowding is worse due to heat related health issues and sheer amount of people is making the heat in hospitals worse (and the AC! Is breaking!) Patients with appointments are being advised to bring in "a lot" of water with them to be able to safely attend. Fans cannot be used in hospitals. Norwich has no functuoning MRI scanners right now. And the staff have to keep working through all of this, they are getting ill and sleep deprived which is compounding issues further. This is not normal 👍

[queervehk]

It was 40C in my flat, it made me so fucking ill. It’s cooled down for a week now but another heat dome is incoming. I don’t know how I’m supposed to deal with this.

[mediasideblog]

A lot of systems which broke in the first heatwave are not going to be repaired in time for the second. Taping cardboard to your windows is apparently effective for making makeshift blackout blinds in a pinch. If you have a tent and access to a back garden or secure porch it might also be safer to sleep outside in the heatwaves. Stay safe!

[mediasideblog]

[eroticcannibal]

MRI machines and cooling units and AC and IT systems in hospitals are breaking due to the heat. Lab equipment is failing. Some cancer treatments cannot be done due to machine failures. A&E overcrowding is worse due to heat related health issues and sheer amount of people is making the heat in hospitals worse (and the AC! Is breaking!) Patients with appointments are being advised to bring in "a lot" of water with them to be able to safely attend. Fans cannot be used in hospitals. Norwich has no functuoning MRI scanners right now. And the staff have to keep working through all of this, they are getting ill and sleep deprived which is compounding issues further. This is not normal 👍

[musashi]

In the PNW too a ton of us live in houses without air conditioning because we never needed it before, you could just run a box fan in the window overnight. We literally do not have the infrastructure

[fieldbears]

"Europeans/Northerners/(Insert Group Here) are just weak" also ignores the class issue.

The poorest folk are the ones living in the homes and apartments that are too old for inbuilt AC and that haven't been retrofitted for it. And they can't afford window units, especially not with the markup, if there even is one left in the store to buy. The people sweltering in the back of every restaurant right now where the aircon is broken but the manager won't close? Those are working class people who can't afford to get fired, working over stove tops in 105F heat.

[latriviata]

In most of these locations these poorest people are disproportionately likely to not be white* which makes the repeated smug geniuses (who ime frequently/mostly also identify themselves as white, which is a fascinating dynamic to unpack another time) in every thread like this piping up with “white people problems!” particularly disgusting. Beyond the perennial point we keep trying to convey on this webbed site that guys, equating ‘Europe’ only with ‘white people’ is what our local racists do and people claiming to be progressive need to stop repeating their talking points.

*plus even outside the lowest incomes or the most heat-intensive manual jobs, things like home ownership rates are also correlated with ethnicity [UK stats as example] and a) a lot of rental tenants are prohibited from having anything except free-standing devices even if they can afford them and b) window AC units are not compatible with a lot of building windows in the UK (casement has long been much commoner than sash) and afaik many other European countries, because they were never built with them in mind. Because this is 15-20•c hotter than summer temperatures at the time they were built. Because of that whole global climate crisis.

This article on housing in Paris was a rough read, and most (possibly all, idk) of the Parisians quoted were Black or North African French, who are in fact a large, long-standing and important part of the population. This really should not be news to anyone.

‘It’s like a furnace’: French struggle with heat-trap homes as climate inequality grows

Many of France’s buildings are not designed for hot weather – and low-income housing estates are suffering the worst

[mediasideblog]

Supportive things to tell your loved ones during a heatwave:

- Better get used to this heat now, because hell is hotter

- Drink water

[ayeforscotland]

Fucking hell can this heat fuck the fuck off. My room is 27 degrees at 9am.

[the-purple-flower]

HOW YOURE NOT THAT FAR OFF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

[ayeforscotland]

This Global Warming thing is getting out of hand.

[mediasideblog]

[starcures]

new boot goofin

[ickaimp]

So this is not a plea for money. This is something that surprised me, and chatting with people on discord, they were unaware of as well.

Discovered last year I couldn’t look at my 2015 MacBook Air without it triggering nausea and migraines, and figured the screen died. Have been getting by on my phone, but concluded I really need a laptop again.

Saved up, realised I could afford a brand new MacBook Neo, and got one.

-And I couldn’t spend more than five minutes looking at the screen without massive eye strain, nausea, vertigo, and if I pushed it, I-need-to-lie-down-in-a-dark-room-for-hours migraines.

Looking up MacBook and Eyestrain explained what is going on. The liquid retina displays that Apple currently has uses Pulse Width Modulation or PWM. In order to give the screens a deeper depth of colour and contrast, PWM flickers between several hundred to thousand times a second.

And there is currently no way to turn it off. There are settings and apps to reduce it, but there is no way to stop the screen from flickering. Checked Apple forums, called Apple Support, and the time I could look at the screen kept shrinking. Got the laptop Tuesday, returned it Friday, today is Sunday and I’m still dealing with a vertigo migraine.

For MacBooks, it seems to vary on the computer model and the software it uses. In retrospect, the issue with my MacBook Air started after a major software update.

And it’s not just an Apple thing. Current Windows and Android screens do the same thing. There’s even a Reddit for people who are sensitive to PWM flickers to help find computers and screens that won’t trigger eyestrain and headaches.

So, yeah. This week has been a learning experience. But for those who are prone to headaches and migraines, this may be something to be aware of, cause I was not.

[pettycentral]

[mediasideblog]

[exquisite-peculiarity]

In the last few years, I moved from the southern US to the northern US. People always joke that people in the south can't handle the cold, or that people in the north can't handle the heat, but I would argue that while upbringing affecting preference is a factor, the more important factor is infrastructure. In Texas, we had lighter, draftier houses that breathed. This helps with heat, but in the winter, if it got down around 15⁰ f (like it usually did up to a couple of times a year), the houses couldn't keep up. It was impossible to heat the indoors over 60⁰, even with blasting the heat. Alternatively, buildings up north don't always have air conditioning, so if it gets up over 95⁰ it is really difficult to handle, especially for prolonged stretches. Climate isn't just personal preference. We have architecture from over the past 100 yrs that is adapted to handle the temps it was before global warming. The architecture in Europe is even older. If people say the temp is untenable, believe them.

[boltlightning]

I DONT CARE HOW MANY BEDS THERE WERE. WHAT IS YOUR BOOK ABOUT

[trekkiesagainstchastity]

(tearfully) w- working at the mattress store

[boltlightning]

i'm so fucking sorry. can you ever forgive me

[thelegendarymmachine]

only one bed at the mattress store?

how are they going to display the mattresses?

[trekkiesagainstchastity]

There are multiple empty bedframes but only one mattress remains

[totallynots8tan]

Very successful mattress store.

[trekkiesagainstchastity]

People really want those store clerks to fuck

[mediasideblog]

His boss has assembled IKEA frames. To keep it real, I fuck him on the floor.

[mediasideblog]

Whom is lining up to get on the patient zero cruise?

[mediasideblog]

[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

[mediasideblog]

It's rooted in misogyny. Cleaning and domestic labor has gendered expectations & there's taboo around paying or even organizing a time to do it because it's quite literally "supposed to be" invisible work.

Domestic tasks are expected to "just get done" without anyone having to think about it.

You speak to a lot of people who think they're in 50/50 split households who don't realize that their partner is doing a majority of the cleaning. (I'm using gender neutral language, but you know what I'm actually saying.)

I was once helping my ex's mother clear the table, and he said "I feel bad just watching you tidy up," so I said "well, you could always help."

[scunthotter]

People who are making posts telling us what is happening over on threads, twitter, and Instagram are like war correspondents sending us reports from the front.

[mediasideblog]

Some twitter users say "Tumblr refugees" in the same way that we say "twitter refugees". Both sides appear to be blissfully unaware of the existence of the other.