Freelance Time Sucker

I do not take credit for any of these photographs.

[tolovaj-escaped-deactivated2025]

Sick sick sick of possibility of being fucking recorded every waking second by tiktok obsessed quasi celebs. Video titled something like "Caught him thinking he's the main character" but it was just a kid wearing headphones, looking out the bus window. Of course it was posted without his knowledge. Stop recording strangers and everything you see, nobody gives a shit and not everyone is happy to be on tiktok or youtube because of a moron with no braincells and an account. What could be a forgettable awkward moment is now permanently there for the victim of lackabrainis infested idiot to get anxious about forever.

[ro-zden]

Okay, this seems like a relevant thing to share today: I've been in this position. Back in college while on that student lifestyle, I somehow ended up with a pretty bad iron deficiency. How bad? I was not only sleeping too much, I was falling asleep everywhere -- in class, in the library, in cafes five minutes after drinking coffee. It was terrible. Anyway, during a class I enjoyed, I was sat at a table with a few classmates, and I started falling asleep while taking notes; nodding off, dropping my pen, startling awake and falling asleep again, until my head was on the table. No one seemed to mind, we were all going through it I guess, and my lecturer was nice enough not to make a big deal out of it.

Cut to the next day and I was in the Students Union, when a friend came up to me and told me how funny that video was of me falling asleep in class was. What? I asked her about it, what did she mean, who made the video, and she realised I literally had no clue about it. Kindly, she told me who to talk to and I thanked her. I was already upset, but I knew it wasn't the messenger's fault. So, I took to Facebook and messaged the girl who made the video -- a girl on my table in the class from before. I asked her about it, and she admitted it right away -- she took the video on her phone during class and posted it to her snapchat. That's how the other girl saw it, not to mention countless others.

Sorting this out was an absolute toil. I felt betrayed and violated that someone would do that while I was obviously not in a position to have any say about it. I lost friendships with the people who took the girl's side, as if it was no big deal or "funny". I had to tell the lecturer about it, because let's face it, that's a shit thing to allow to happen during class itself, the department moved to be more alert and proactive about restricting phone use in class, and all that girl had to do was give a half-hearted apology. The next semester, she was still openly using her phone in another class we had.

For a long time, I couldn't trust anyone who held their phone up around me, as if to take photos or video. It would make me so anxious and put me on edge. I never did speak to the people who cosigned her behaviour, who acted like it wasn't their problem that their bff video-recorded a person in class over their health condition without their consent.

I did eventually grow out of my anxiety around phones, and I resisted the urge to break that girl's phone, but, I will absolutely bring back that energy if I see someone record a stranger in public without their consent. Take it from someone who's been that target -- if you think it's okay, you deserve to get your shit wrecked.

[ro-zden]

I just want to add, in case anyone reads this and isn't sure -- yes, it is absolutely fine to reblog this, and in fact I encourage you to. If testimony from a former target of this behaviour is the one thing that makes it click for anyone thinking of doing it, if it makes them reconsider before potentially ruining a stranger's life, then my experience will be worth it for me.

Don't record strangers and put that shit on the Internet or social media without their consent.

[angiethewitch]

a "friend" of mine posted a video of me online once when I was in a psychotic episode. I was actively struggling and she thought it was funny to film me while I was hallucinating and talking to thin air while in an active delusion. I still struggle when people hold their phones up. a few months ago I was out with my friend and I looked really good and I felt really confident and I was just sat having coffee outside when a man walked past obviously fucking filming me. I was immediately reminded of that tiktok thing "pov you're a girl in a skirt/you're a girl in public" where girls would show men filming them and staring at them. i went from feeling cool and confident to feeling like public property. and I remembered being filmed while in an episode and got paranoid my friend wasn't real and this man was filming me because I was the haha funny crazy person talking to an empty chair because that had fucking happened to me before.

you film that homeless man laughing to himself and talking to an empty space? yeah he's probably psychotic. you film someone having a meltdown and screaming at nothing? probably also psychotic. you are taking advantage of someone's most vulnerable state and you think its funny and you want to get Internet clout for filming them. youre a piece of shit if you do that. I went from feeling safe around my old friend, feeling unjudged, feeling supported, to feeling used and unsafe and judged.

this shit overwhelmingly affects disabled, sick and mentally ill people. cut it the fuck out. the next time you think it would be funny to film the weird old lady talking to the trees, take a second and consider: would you like to have your most vulnerable moments immortalised on camera?

[eroticcannibal]

Also this shit can straight up get people killed. You don't know which people showing up in that video are in hiding. Posting ANY video taken in public is putting people's lives at risk.

More people than you would think are living in fear of violence if the wrong person finds them. Dont help abusers. Stop posting videos online without the explicit permission of every single person who appears in it.

[tastefullyoffensive]

It’s October! You know what that means... 🎃 (via kxvo)

[queerlyglittering]

all my life I’ve somehow only ever seen the gifs of this. I never even knew that the pumpkin man was dancing to the Ghostbusters theme. This whole thing is so much better than I ever could have expected from the gifs omg

[firstgrave]

[theselittlefeelings]

1. The Republican Party turns out for EVERY vote. Primaries, local elections, midterms, you name it. Most dems show up once every four year and then get defeatist when things don’t immediately change. It took the Republicans YEARS to overturn RvW but it has been a long game goal of theirs. YEARS of voting, and you’re gonna opt out after one vote. Okay.

2. Primaries are when you vote for who you want. Elections are when you vote for who you can. If you’re not voting in the primary, you’re letting the moderate centrist do-nothing candidate win.

3. Local elections affect your daily life. That sherif in Texas who is refusing to enforce the abortion ban? Local election. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, so much of this is trickle up from local politics.

4. Call your damn representatives. Even if it feels hopeless. The gun control reform that just passed (as minimal as it is) was bipartisan because people showed their reps that they wanted change. Get vocal as a voter and prove courting your vote matters.

5. If someone in your area is running for office and needs votes, be a signature for them. Not everyone can afford to pay to run. You want to support better candidates, put your name behind them (only in your district and always read what you’re signing first).

6. The two party system is shit. We know that. But the democrats are a big tent housing a lot of different opinions and trying to cater to them all. Republicans are generally united in one mission of dismantling everything and protecting only their own. This is also why Dems don’t have the same type of “super majority” and can’t easily whip the same voting results. And anyone who thinks Obama had a super majority for enough time to codify roe does not understand politics. He had about 18 days of actual in-session time, split into two different sessions.

7. Purity politics isn’t going to get you anywhere. The candidate is a bus stop getting you closer to where you want to be. They’re not the end goal, and a smart voter knows that.

8. Voter suppression is huge in America. Help other voters register and get to the polls. It’s not always indifference keeping people from voting. Do something to help disenfranchised voters.

Let me repeat: The two party system is shit. We need to get rid of the electoral college. We need ranked choice voting. We need to get rid of Citizens United. Our country is an oligarchy. Always has been. Not denying that. But Living in these ideals of what we should be without creating any change now isn’t going to get you anywhere. Being defeatist and abstaining from the process is cutting off your own nose to spite your face. Its saying “the other team is scoring too many goals, so instead of playing, I’m just gonna sit on the sidelines. That’ll teach everyone.” No, you’re just gonna keep losing. Maybe, instead, vote in the primaries and choose better teammates.

Y’all kill me with these “hot takes.” They ain’t even half baked.

Now, if you want to talk about the other things we should be doing IN ADDITION TO voting, like general strikes, organizing, etc. Then that’s a different conversation we should also be having.

[calligrafiti]

Ah, the Russian anti-voting bots are out and about.

[memberain]

The FAA is requesting comment on airplane seat size 

[memberain]

Opinion | John Lewis: Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation (Published 2020)

Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe.

[padawan-historian]

Perhaps minimalist design is so prevalent because we no longer have anything to say.

The Cultural Tutor

[dancinbutterfly]

Sorry, but this is the wrong takeaway. It assumes that the perpetrators of these decisions have anything to do with the cultures and aren't multinational cooperate entities moving through the world at a breakneck speed. Problem with minimalism is endemic not of the fact that *we* no longer have anything *to* say. The problem with minimalism is a sign that *we* no longer have *any* say in culture *at all*. The problem is that the powerful have stopped valuing art in their surroundings. The wealthy and powerful have decided that their success is now measured in uniformity and sterility rather than lushness and variety of their surrounding. Do not fucking put that shit on the pleabs and their lack of creativity. Put that shit on the powerful and their lack ability to enjoy good things.

[rederiswrites]

It's not about taste at all. It's about manufacturing. It's about profit. The simplest thing is the easiest to mass produce at lowest cost and highest profit margin.

When you're making things by hand, it's little additional trouble to give them some character. When you're making thousands, to fit in a wide variety of settings, you don't customize.

But it is absolutely alienating and depressing.

[godloveyell]

Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture ❧ Current Affairs

<p>And if you don’t, why you should…</p>

[gender-trash]

the post about fast fashion/sewing one’s own clothes blew up again… honestly the more i think about it the angrier i am about it. with both clothing and furniture we sort of live in a world where the market is being overtaken by disposable items made with cheap materials at the lowest possible labor cost. and like, not to diss ikea or anything — god knows they’ve supplied me with enough cheap bookshelves — but this is exactly why i ended up building my own desk.

my dad tells stories about his mom, who was very talented at sewing — it wasn’t her “day job” but in that part of rural iowa in the 60s she was the person you called if, say, you needed a wedding dress on next to no notice. (i’m also told she was excellent at baking pies, but that’s beside the point.) at that time and place, it was legitimately *cheaper* to make your own clothes than to buy them from the store. they would be made of much the same materials, except that you would substitute your own labor for that of whoever assembled the storebought garment.

today, the fabric to make a shirt will almost certainly cost you more than an equivalent department store shirt would. to say nothing of the cost of your time and labor. part of this is that people who sew their own clothes generally don’t want to waste their time on shit fabric, so fabric stores don’t sell quite the same grade of shreddable polyester. part of this is that our modern globalized supply chain has minimized both labor and materials costs as hard as it can, and this optimization has intertwined labor and materials sourcing a lot more than they apparently were in the 60s.

let’s turn back to the subject of furniture. the equivalent of the cheap polyester department-store shirt is the ikea desk. the desk surface is made of laminated particle-board, which is lighter and cheaper than actual wood; the desk is sold to you flat-pak, and you assemble it yourself, thus saving on labor costs. the laminate surface will probably delaminate after a few years’ use. also as with the cheap shirt, any damage is near-impossible to fix — you could sand and refinish a scuffed plywood surface, but there’s no sanding laminated particle-board. it’s also harder to modify to suit one’s needs — i can drill a neat hole for a monitor arm in my plywood desk much more easily than in a particle-board surface.

in both cases, what do you do if you want a slightly higher grade of item? well, obviously you’ll have to pay more money — but it’s difficult to be sure you’re really getting your money’s worth. you have to spend ages and ages comparison-shopping and reading reviews about how quality has really gone downhill since production moved to [new country]. often — especially with clothes — the thing that your money is actually paying for is Style, as separate from Substance. or good advertising. i’ve been halfheartedly in the market for a decent couch for some time, and i’ve noticed that nearly every apartment makeover video on youtube is sponsored by the same furniture website, which of course has provided a free couch — that the youtuber assures us is Really Good, For The Price. as soon as a manufacturer acquires a reputation for Quality, it is in their economic interest to sell out as hard and fast as they can and pocket the increased margin from selling crap at the price of quality until people notice. and in a world where most shopping has moved online, it’s difficult to tell whether you’re still in the actual-quality period. i’m not sure if there even *are* furniture stores around here at quality levels in between ikea and danish concepts (suggesting a market for a mid-tier scandinavian furniture purveyor, perhaps hailing from norway or finland).

because of the sort of person that i am, i tire rapidly of the endless comparison shopping. i don’t want to become a damn couch supply chain expert, i just want to retire the folding chair from my living room. it can’t be *that* hard to build a couch, can it? well, not if one is privileged enough to have the tools and time and space to do it in. i think most of the comments and tags on the fast fashion post are from people wishing they had one or more of the above to make their own clothes with. speaking from direct personal experience, a sewing machine is at least both cheaper and easier to find space for than a minimally equipped woodshop.

the other common piece of advice is to buy used, buy from a thrift store or an estate sale. unfortunately hunting down all your shit used also takes a lot of time and effort, and particularly in the case of furniture hauling the stuff home is a nontrivial logistical problem. again, money or more nebulous forms of privilege (the friend with the truck) are needed to smooth these roadblocks. and it’s really amazing that the solution to “i want an item that is not garbage” is “buy an item manufactured at a time when they were not yet garbage”. yes, of course, the less-durable instances won’t have survived the passage of time, but that’s only part of the effect. things genuinely used to be manufactured to a higher standard of quality. my sewing machine is from ebay; it’s the same model my *other* grandma had, a baseline singer consumer-grade machine. all its gears are metal, and it has a heavy-ass cast metal housing, too. the other household sewing machine is a modern singer consumer-grade machine and for all its fancy stitches it looks sort of like a doll’s toy — the plastic gears are going to break at some point, or the motor will burn out, and if it turns out that the motor on the modern edition is designed to be user-replaceable i will personally eat a hat. i suppose we also used to ask a lot more of our consumer-grade sewing machines, back when sewing one’s own clothes was a baseline household skill for everyone but Rich People, instead of a hobby that consumes more money than it saves you.

i don’t know if my post really has a conclusion. i’m just angry that we live in a fallen world full of miraculous technology and yet we have not solved the seemingly simple economic problem of exchanging a reasonable amount of money for a newly produced durable good that isn’t a complete piece of shit. i am a *robotics engineer*, for the love of fuck; i have a complicated, rare, well-compensated skillset. it cannot *possibly* be a comparative advantage for me to spend my time building a couch or sewing a shirt instead of paying someone to do it for me (ideally also, if i may ask for a miracle, someone who gets things like fair pay and healthcare and vacation time). why is this transaction so damn hard??

[tikkunolamorgtfo]

Conservatives will be like “Why are you holding me accountable for my bigoted beliefs? Whatever happened to tolerance???”

[elfwreck]

The response to that is Tolerance Is Not a Moral Precept - it is a peace treaty. It is a contract of cooperation, or at least, of non-interference.

the model of a peace treaty differs from the model of a moral precept in one simple way: the protection of a peace treaty only extends to those willing to abide by its terms. It is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact.

(Bold added)

Someone who’s actively trying to oppress, belittle, exclude, or harm people based on their identities is not complying with the contract, so there’s no reason to extend its protection to them.

[relelvance]

[horrorlesbians]

the normalization of being able to take photos of random people without their consent and just post it online without care for their feelings or privacy being violated for who knows to see makes me literally murderous

[frederick-the-great]

completely untested theory but

i think not only has social media eroded ideas of privacy (”if you have nothing to hide why do you care?”), but in a much more harmful way it promotes the notion that there should be no difference between public thoughts and private behaviour. But this is totally bogus because people behave differently according to different situations. This isn’t being “fake”; it’s just being proficient at navigating social situations.

The way I behave with my friends and my family, the way I behave in private, is not for public consumption. Nor should it be. Publicness is a matter of choice, it shouldn’t be mandatory. People are not entitled to anyone’s private thoughts on anything. People have a right to decide what they wish to show in public and what they wish to hide from public view and consumption.

This separation is vital not only for people as social beings, but for their mental well-being as well. There’s literally no upside to feeling that your self is constantly out there for everyone to see and dissect.

[memberain]

As far as I can tell MM was the best thing to happen to them in at least a century. She has a degree in international studies. She interned at an embassy. She could have been a diplomat. Her acting career means she knows how to present herself in front of a camera and how to connect with an audience. Her philanthropic work was essentially the same as what she’d be doing working for them. She was OVERQUALIFIED. And they threw her away. Fools.

[memberain]

How does a parent not take calls from their child? How does a parent/grandparent let tabloids publish the address of their child and then strip them of their security detail? How do you listen to a cry for help and then not only not help them but stop them from being able to get help at all? How do you strip a baby of it’s birthright and the specific birthright that identifies it as your grandchild at that? How do you look someone in the eyes and promise to keep them safe and then go out of your way to create an unimaginably toxic and hateful environment that will undoubtedly make them unsafe?

[sussexblr]

Harry filming Meghan and Archie (and the pups) playing on the beach in Cali

[shewhotellsstories]

Deep sigh. How is Diana managing to be the superior parent from beyond the grave? The bar was so low Charles. How does one simply not care about their family members’ safety? Stripping a baby of security when there are racist threats being made is a very special kind of cruel. And I get that these kinds of things tend to defy logic, but how do you learn nothing in twenty years? Harry and Meghan deserved better. 

[paxamericana]

you’re hearing it more and more

[pervocracy]

[judgejudyofficial]

thank god Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton came together to make a PSA about the dangers of fake news