@theartofmadeline
Love Begins
Not today Justin
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Discoholic šŖ©
Jimmy Eat World
hello vonnie
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cherry valley forever
Claire Keane
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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Product Placement
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2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Fai_Ryy
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Sade Olutola
Game Changer & Make Some Noise
ojovivo
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@n-0ooooooooooo
I collaborated with the Human Artistry Project to make this strip alongside other web cartoonists to make the point that āStealing isnāt Innovationā when it comes to A.I. usage. It seems to be doing numbers on instagram and elsewhere, so you may also read it here, tumblr.
May the discourse that ensues be long and unhelpful.
you put those tags on this post where they belong
A Drop in the Bucket.
A sincere thank you for the vulnerability and the effort in making this .
Years ago back when I worked in cubicle land, we were hiring junior software developers. They didnāt have to have a ton of experience, just a willingness to learn, and some demonstration of their software skills. Like: show me a program you wrote (any language) or a web site you designed. Anything.
And there was this one guy I talked with who seemed super sharp, but had virtually zero experience writing software. When it came time to do the show-n-tell part of the interview he whips out his laptop, brings up a website, and spins it around to show me what he made.
A website of tiny ceramic frogs.
Not for sale. Justā¦ all these ceramic frogs, organized into categories. Frogs on bicycles, frogs with hats, frogs sitting on lily pads. It was a virtual museum of ceramic frogs in web form.
I scrolled through his online collection of frogs, slightly baffled.
āThis is your website?ā I asked finally.
āYep!ā
āYou coded this yourself?ā I popped into view-source mode and poked around some incredibly well-formatted, well-commented html. I nodded slowly. This guy was meticulous.
āYep!ā
āSoā¦ whereād all the frogs come from?ā
āI made those too,ā he says, beaming.Ā
And while Iām processing this he rummages in his bag and pulls out a little ceramic frog working at a computer terminal. He places it on the table before us, next to the laptop.
āAnd THIS one,ā he says,Ā āI made for you! As a thank you for the interview.ā
It was adorable. I hired him on the spot. I mean, why not? Worst case heād wash out in 90 days and weād hire somebody else. He turned out to be one of the best developers on our team.Ā
And yes, his cubicle was loaded with ceramic frogs.
itās sooo funny when rude customers encounter employees who can deny them service for the first time.
i was working at a little cafe where I could deny service over bad behavior, harassment etc. & mask mandates had just ended a week before & already people were being weird about me still wearing mineāan N95, the kind shaped kinda like a duckbill.
so this man walked in, looked at me sooo scathingly, laughed at me, and said ādamn. never known a woman to chooseā¦practicality over looks.ā
And I just said, āoh. you can go, youāre not getting a drink.ā And he said, āwhat???ā
I said, āsir, you just walked in at 6 am & called women impractical and me ugly in one sentence.ā
And he was so astonished he didnāt even argue he just turned around and left ššš» it was like he suddenly became self aware
One summer I was running ferry rides across a lake so people could see the waterfalls without walking 6 miles when a guy snapped my bra strap as he was boarding the boat. So i immediately threw him off, he started yelling for my manager, my boss cheerfully informed him that, yeah, sheās the captain of the boat and she can kick off anyone she wants. He goes to storm off, looks expectantly at his girlfriend, and she just goes, āWell, IāM not walking six miles, Michael! Iāll meet you back at the car!ā and sits right back down!!!!
The expression on his face when he was told that he couldnāt get on the boat, then immediately told that his girlfriend was ditching him? PRICELESS. he just blinked at her and then stormed off like a child. I gave her a free hat and was like maybe rethink this relationshipā¦ā¦.
i once had this fucker come up to order a beer. while i pour it he shows me the wanky fucking chemical structure tattoo on his arm and heās like āhey. you know what this isā i was like ānah sorryā (never cared abt chemistry in school, plus having to look at a some randoās pretentious tattoo gives me the douche chills). he decides to respond with āheh. you must not read many booksā
i immediately stop pouring his beer. i reply: āheh. you must not want this beer.ā thirsty boy immediately starts groveling like a worm āplease please no i do want the beer im sorry im sorryā believe me when i say it was one of the most pathetic things ive ever witnessed
gotta love people immediately backpedaling when they realise that there are Consequences To Being Mean
I genuinely believe that part of why it has become so normalized to be openly callous and evil in politics is that customer service culture has trained affluent people that they can treat everyone they consider beneath them however they want and still be treated kindly.
It's also crazy how much more polite people are when they know they are talking to a government employee. Once a week I staff a state "wildlife support" phone line, and very rarely do I ever have a negative interaction, even though MOST of my job is telling people "no we don't perform that service, and there is no agency that does." "no, we can't help that animal, and neither can you, as that is illegal." I tell people "no" up to 30 times per day and I've only had a prickly customer about 3-4 times, and properly yelled at only once. (And if I get yelled at I am allowed to end the conversation.)
Meanwhile, when I worked at PetSmart grooming, I got yelled at MULTIPLE times EVERY day. Over a dog's haircut that I didn't even do.
This is part of why I try to hold myself to a standard of patience, respect, and understanding whenever someone is working a service sector job and I'm the customer. It costs nothing to be decent.
Not only does it get you better service, but it establishes a calm vibe to counteract whatever bullshit they've encountered that day.
And if you visit repeatedly, sometimes you get extra snacks. Win-win!
If any part of your plan involves the words "nobody could be that stupid", please be prepared to be proven wrong at any minute at a moment's notice. Pay in mind that the person determined to prove you wrong may already be aware of this assumption, and is already approaching your current location at an alarming speed.
"it will be fine if people just"
people will not just
In 2011 I attended an event called Bmore Fail, in which entrepreneurs in Baltimore talked about their failures and what they learned from them.
What I learned is that there is an inflexible rule about how people interact with systems. If your system would work perfectly if people Just Would, and yet they Don't, then your system is bad and you should feel bad. Systems must be built with an eye toward "will people actually do this"?
Recycling was a thing when I was a child. (The 70's.) In my home in New York State, you could carry recyclables to a recycling center. Nobody did. Now in 2024 Baltimore there is a trash truck that comes every week to pick up my recyclables, and I and my neighbors fill our cans with objects that can be recycled, because a system was developed that was easy for busy people to do, and there's a lot of social pressure to do it -- but the social pressure wouldn't exist if it wasn't easy to do. Only the most crunchy granola people bitched at you if you didn't recycle in 1979, when it required a lot of effort. Now it is considered kind of on par with spitting in the street or leaving a dirty diaper on the diaper changing table in the bathroom instead of throwing it out, if you don't recycle.
Your job as the system creator is to make it as easy as possible for people to do the right thing, and as hard as possible to do the wrong thing. This is why web forms have data validation (but too much data validation actually makes the forms harder, so hit the spot in the middle.) And if you want people to adopt social change, whether it's environmentalism, accepting gay people, or whatever, make it as easy as possible. And don't guilt people about not doing it until it's as easy as possible; instead phrase things more like "wouldn't it be cool if". It's not the fault of the individual that they can't get things done in a bad system. Fix the system.
if users regularly fuck up using a tool you made, and your answer is "you're holding it wrong", the next question you should ask is "why did i make this tool so it's easy to hold it wrong?"
And then you're tech support begging the development team to change something very small that would make the user experience so much better cause they made the tool too easy to hold wrong and development will whine at you because they're very busy with the back end stuff and hey you're the customer facing side why can't you just make them, and no you can't just make them, please development please I'm begging you make the tool less easy to hold wrong.
sorry what was that about how "accepting gay people" is on the list of things we should "make easier"?
@alarajrogers what did you mean by this?
that the onus is on gay people to be more palatable?
No, the onus is on whoever is building the system. Most of the time that's not the gay people themselves, because people who are marginalized are rarely in a position to build systems that affect their own marginalization; that's what allies with privilege are for.
A small thing. If you want to support trans and nonbinary people, then on government forms, if they require gender and you can't get around it, allow "other"; better still, don't require gender. If you're building a medical system, and the patient's gender is M, do not gray out all the "female" problems he might be presenting with on the grounds that a man can't possibly have menstrual problems, be pregnant, or have issues with his uterus; likewise if the patient presents as F, don't make it impossible to enter a diagnosis of prostate cancer for her.
Don't set up validation rules that prevent someone with gender M from having a husband. Better yet, let "husband" and "wife" both be covered by the term "spouse", because that is inclusive of non-binary spouses as well.
Because I'm in IT, I think in terms of IT systems. But there are government systems and insurance systems and financial systems and all sorts of systems out there, that should be set up so that a gay person will be able to navigate it as easily as a straight person, and a straight person will see that the available options don't privilege them at the expense of everyone else... a subtle reminder that no, you're not the center of the universe and gay people exist. Why do you think the right wing fights so hard against there being Spanish on forms that are also in English? You'd think, it doesn't harm anyone using the form for there to be both Spanish and English. But they know, the presence of Spanish reminds English speakers that the world doesn't center around what works for them; other options exist. That's what they want to get rid of, the subtle reminder that someone besides them is important too.
This is a discussion about how to make systems work in some way other than If People Would Just, making them easier to promote the result you want, so I'm not sure how you even got "the onus is on gay people to be more palatable", and I get the feeling you don't understand the context of the discussion. I am not even sure how you could devise a system that incorporates "gay people should make themselves more palatable" because that sounds exactly like a thing that People Should Just... meaning, you're relying on humans to behave in the exact specific way you need them to for your system to work, and the whole point of this conversation is that doing that dooms your system to fail. Gay people will never Just Make Themselves More Palatable To Straights, as a cohort, so if your system for getting gay people to be better accepted relies on If Gay People Would Just, your system will fail.
Unfortunately, reading comprehension is also one of those things that If People Would Just, so posting about things on Tumblr is also a system that's doomed to fail. :-)
Pro tip: if it would confuse a sheep it WILL confuse a herd of people
thatās his little guy!!
Really to prevent driplessness.
lil whiteboy busting it down arctic style
Vote for progressives. #DSA #ZohranMamdani
Democrats, are you taking notes? This is how you get shit done.
Foreigners tend to assume that the big cultural confusions between Australians and most other countries are gonna be based on our food, or social services, or weather, or weird animals. But itās never that. In my experience, the real cultural confusions re: Australians are about The Respect Thing almost one hundred per cent of the time.
? I realize im proving your point but what
The broader Australian culture doesnāt, as a whole, have status-based respect. Some individual groups might, because theyāve brought it from other cultures theyāre involved in, but the general culture doesnāt. Thereās no sense that your boss or scout leader or the guy in charge of your country deserves more respect than you, or that you should behave differently to them than you would to any random person you know similarly well. (The very rare exceptions include ritualised settings, such as courtrooms, and for some reason the fact that children useĀ āMiss/Ms/Mrā honourifics for teachers at school.)Ā
I donāt mean Australians are aĀ āstick it to the man, fight back against those in powerā kind of people ā weāre generally not. And I donāt mean we have aĀ āweāre going to do the status thing but pretend we donāt and pretend to all be equal in mixed companyā thing that middle-class Americans do. I mean the status-respect system does not exist, and if you try to use it, it weirds people the fuck out at best, and insults them at worst. Treating someone most countries would say isĀ āaboveā you differently in Australia is basically telling that person that you hate them; itās sayingĀ āIām forced to interact with you due to our current circumstances but I donāt see you as a person and wonāt grant you the basic respect of treating you like an equalā. (When I was in America, I was constantly suppressing the instinct that random service people were sassing me because they overuse honourifics and were so keen to help me.)
This makes interacting with foreigners really baffling in a lot of circumstances. In university, my international friends would often describe Australians asĀ āfriendly, but very rudeā. They thought we were all arseholes because of the way we spoke to our PhD supervisors and soforth, and wouldnāt believe us when we explained that our behaviour was respectful and that being deferential would be weird and awkward and insulting to them. Learning Japanese had a similar problem; everyone in the class could get the concept of different levels of formality and deference in language, ans was happy to memorise the usage of various words for Japanese people, but using them on each other was super weird, and weād only ever use the most casual form of anything unless specifically instructed otherwise by the teacher.
The reason Iāve been thinking of this lately is because Iāve recently become aware that a lot of countries have likeā¦ a special respect for their countryās leaders? I donāt just meanĀ āyeah, that guy makes the rulesā, but that having that office makes them better than everyone else, somehow. Which I expect from countries with royal families, because Tradition, but Iāve recently found that Americans feel this way about their President, too. (Except the current one, who seems to be enough of a dick to break the system.) Like, if six Americans were in an aeroplane that was going down and there was only one parachute and one of the Americans was A Generic Non-Trump President, itās just assumed that that guy gets the parachute? Like heās automatically the life worth saving over the others, and theyād just give up their chance in favour of him? And thatās so weird to me. An Australian prime minister would have a 1 in 6 chance at the parachute; however the people decided,Ā āthis guy happens to be the leader of the countryā wouldnāt be a factor.Ā
When Americans donāt like a President, they usually feel the need to work in how heāsĀ ānot my presidentā, either through sheer denial, or by finding some way heās theoretically illegitimate (different ways votes are counted, wild conspiracy theories about birth country, etc.), and while making sure those rules are obeyed IS extremely important, Iāve recently noticed that part of the motivation seems to be that theyāre invested in whether heās Really The President because being the President somehow makes someone Special rather than just a normal dick whoās been put in charge of the group project. (You see the same thing inĀ āTHIS IS TRUMPāS AMERICA!ā, like him becoming President gives him superpowers or something).
This is getting off-topic. Point is, in Australia you can run into the Prime Minister and ask him to help you fix your phone and if heās not busy but refused to help you out heād be kind of a dick; of course he should help you out. And if I walk into your restaurant and you act like Iām a movie star and youāre going to be super attentive to my every need because Iām The Customer, Iām gonna get creeped out. Weāre suspicious and insulted by what most people in the world consider to be basic manners, and vice versa. And it makes interacting with foreigners super weird because I always feel like theyāve got some invisible heirarchical flowchart in the back of their minds that I donāt.
I have long noticed that Americans have absolutely the same cultural attitude to the President as they would to a serving monarchy. They just think they donāt on a technicality.
Can confirm that if I call someone āSir/Madamā I generally mean āassholeā (unless talking to an animal or tiny child) and that if I get called Maāam I feel like Iām being called the asshole, which made time in Atlanta, Georgia suoer weird.
Australians have a very good attitude to respect
ā¦so this explains why I have spent the last fourteen years low-grade pissed off at nearly every Australian I meet, because every time I try to be American Polite at them it pisses them off. And, for that matter, why my second boss here, the one I was so careful to be Formally Respectful of and always called āsir,ā took such an intense dislike to me.
Yeah, even if that boss understood that you were American and what that meant, their instincts wouldāve been screaming at them the whole time that you were being a dick. Itās a difficult thing for us to get used to even when we know the culture is differentā.
As a Brit visiting Australia, the most vivid experience I had of this is: in the UK itās really uncool to get into the passenger seat of a cab - youāre expected to get in the back. In Australia the reverse was apparently true.
ā¦ I am only just now realising that inAmerican and British movies and stuff, people donāt get in the passenger seat of a taxi.
covid update: youāre now meant to get in the back seat for social distancing and IT FEELS SO RUDE. sorry taxi person I AM NOT TRYING TO SHUN YOu just I know there are rules and weāre protecting each other. letās be intensely awkward for a while.
Reblogging this because I just remembered the time Molly Meldrum absolutely horrified Prince Charles by describing meeting the Queen as āI saw your mum last weekā.
One of my favorite travel books described humanity as, broadly speaking, having two types of culture: one where formal is respectful and informal is rude, and vice versa. Australian culture sees formality as hostile or unfriendly and familiarity as warmth. Itās decidedly not the case in USA as a whole, though as with any broad category the dichotomy changes as the group gets smaller.
YOU PUT THE THING INTO WORDS!
Different cultures are fascinating.
Look thereās honestly a lot of history that build our culture today to be like this. We never really had a true aristocracy or class system in Australia and was still considered the dirty colonies up until federation in 1901. Even when we had the gold rush in the 19th century there were rich people but also anyone could dig up a nugget and get rich so no one really bothered with the rich = better than you thing because old johnno down the road who normally is on the piss all day and lives in a swag just picked up a 2lb piece of gold thatās worth thousands of dollars so now he can go buy his own pub and sell his own beer but everyone will still think of him as that guy who was always cracking bad jokes at the end of the bar and drinking a minimum of 8 beers a day. Sure we have rich people but we also pull them back down to earth when they get hoity toity. Australia is one of the most unionised countries in the world and yeah its true we dont get upset by much but when we do, all hell breaks loose. Look up some of Australiaās biggest protests and union movements like the convict rebellions, Eureka stockade, the campaign for the 8 hour day, and he general history of our Australian Labor Party. Australia was the second country in the world to grant womenās suffrage. So many unions and strikes and demands we made in Australia demanding equal and fair rights to working class in the 19th century that by federation in 1901 we were ahead of the world with workers rights and equality. Really the only class system we had was the employer employee divide but we still never bowed down and took it from them just because they boss. Iām not going to go into what happened in the 20th century but if youāre interested definitely look up post war Australia, the womenās working unions in the middle of the century, definitely look up the late Bob Hawke and his legacy, the nurseās strike in Victoria in the 80s, the land rights movement and Eddie Mabo, and go from there.
I remember in school we were always taught to treat others how you wanted to be treated. You were no better or worse than anyone else. You want to be treated equal to everyone else and that meant being polite and showing decency and helping each other out. Itās true we only use titles for teachers or elders (indigenous Australians use āAuntyā and āUncleā as a show of respect to their elders) but outside of that if someone calls you Miss y/n or sir or whatever itās just uncomfortable. In hospitality and retail some of us will still use sir/ma'am mainly because we donāt know customers names but even then thatās rare and usually applied only to elderly. We personally donāt want to be addressed by titles or even surnames (unless itās a nickname which Iāll get to) so we donāt use the titles or surnames for other people. With surnames often we use them as a nickname if we dont/canāt shorten their names. Getting a nickname (a good one, not one that is intentionally meant to bully you ofc. E.g. ScoMo is the nickname for our PM but heās a piece of shit and ScoMo sounds a lot like Scum-mo) is the biggest show of respect in Australia. Usually itās simply just adding a vowel or changing it up a little. I.e. John = johnno, Darren = Dazza, etc. If we canāt do it to your first name we do it to your last name. If we canāt do it to your last name itās either a feature or behaviour and we put it in a good light. You ever notice that Australians like to make fun of each other and āinsultā each other? Thereās a very subtle difference when itās truly meant to be insulting but thatās our way of being affectionate for each other. We will point out your flaws and make fun of you (and stop if you say no) and we will give you a nickname and itās all in good humour. Itās one of the things I find foreigners get really upset about because they dont understand why we are so rude to each other. You build up a hard skin in this country and forget hat sometimes that stuff IS a bit insulting.
Itās a very backwards system of respect but it is a very honest one. No one is better than you. No one is worse than you. We are all humans.
We treat our acquaintances like friends and our friends like family. Teasing your friends is expected the same way it is for siblings. If you act like someone is above you, in a not-joking way, thatās basically declaring that you donāt see them as potential friend materialāthat something about them repels you and you want as many barriers between you as possible.
It would hurt my dad so badly if I ever called him āsir.ā
Yep, and the automatic assumption that you think Iām an idiot/bitch if Iām called ma'am. The only time it has ever happened and I havenāt taken offence has been brand new army recruits/cadets, who are required to use it while in public to show deference to civilians.
I legit take less offense from being referred to as a pigdog cunt than I do being called ma'am. Getting a sweary character reference or having a friend call you a mad cbomb is totally fine in Aus. Ma'am is not something I associate with respect, being included as part of the group, or acceptance in any way - itās pointing out rather emphatically that you are āotherā
This is interesting as hell as an American raised in an Active Duty environment. As a kid I called everyone Maāam or Sir and I wonder how jarring that child would be in Australia
Whenever I watch an American show and a kid calls their parents āsirā and/or 'ma'amā I immediately assume that the intention is to clue the audience in on the fact that that child is being very severely abused. Addressing an elderly neighbour or something like that would be seen as charmingly respectful from a kid, but doing it to all adults would set off alarm bells in the heads of any Australian adult who wasnāt familiar with your past. Theyād get it once they learned you were raised around American soldiers though, and expect you to grow out of it.
Addendum from a sometimes linguist from the ragged outskirts of a Navy area.
There's basically three tiers of behavior.
Fancy proper/office work. All rules of "customer service" apply. Everyone is "ma'am/sir/miss/miz" unless otherwise specified.
Casual but "aboveboard". Everyone is dude, or the equivalent, and manners are minded. Think classmates or the equivalent. Topics can be varied, nasty/rude topics are saved for jokes and strictly in passing.
"Hey fuckface". This exists in work places where the boss ain't, and holy sweet jesus there are no rules. This was a lot more flagrant with older generations and leans heavily into "locker room talk", but muttering something under your breath is an art and science, and if you don't speak it too bad.
Family... listen, not only is every family different but many ethnicities exist side by side. Explaining why we (my family) STILL call ourselves Irish is harder to explain than that my neighbors are Black, Mexican, Philippino, and sometimes all three. Honestly the White people trip me out the hardest, cause either I'm too coarse or too formal and I just don't... I don't get it.
yay Kitsap
For the next several hours, we expand our shared vocabulary to several thousand words.
Um..... are any of you linguists who want to weigh in on this.... that sounds crazy. I dont think weir researched that number at all....
like. okay. im ignoring that i dont know enough about languages here and am just gonna indulge in some weirism myself.....
if i assume several hours, is 10 hours, and several thousand is at minimum. 2000. u get me. being very generous on how i would apply the modifier "several". that means 2000 words in 600 minutes... are u seeing my problem.... you are on average spending 0.3 minutes. 18 seconds. per word....
and grace cant even distinguish eridian speech himself he has to use audio wave software and then inputs frequencies INTO AN EXCEL SPREADSHEET.... before he can even log the definition. what. WHAT.
I diagnose this writer with Dipshit STEM Major.
Defining characteristics:
assumes humanities/the arts are much easier and more intuitive than they are
nerd/insufferable about numbers
writes female scientists as Cool Girl, Evil, Misunderstood, or Whimsically Quirky
faps about gear/tech on the page in an unreadable block of text
Technology Is Infallible
Mansplaining (especially to a female peer with equivalent experience who Does Not Need That)
average guy is picked because he's The Averagest
SALVADOR DALĆ'S THE HALLUCINOGENIC TOREADOR BUT MAKE IT SLUTTY BISEXUAL LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!
