A Brand-New Satchel

I've been coerced into coming to this hellsite, and yet I find myself staring to like the vibe. +20, that's all you get

[viralfrog]

[gaymerkittycat]

[melonwah]

[nextlevelsmp3]

[exhaustedcatgirl]

Frankly, I think companies presenting basic health and consumer safety information as "boring," "uncool," and "not worth your care" should carry a hefty fine based on the revenue that company generates

[boobachu]

The lameo gay crap we're legally forced to tell you: You may die of diseentary

[throo]

Wh-what do you mean it’s from a birthday cake

[throo]

We could have been eating him

[bogleech]

Zubat is a broadcast symbol.

I noticed years ago that the wings look like stylized "soundwaves" but the meaning of its two long stick legs JUST clicked and I can't find anyone else pointing this out?!

[bogleech]

....Golbat still isn't AS cool to me, but here I was still thinking it had no visual theme at all until this made me realize it's a SPEAKER??? Maybe everyone else did notice that already, maybe I was the last fool who doubted golbat

[hotvampireadjacent]

Um

[galileosballs]

Also, please do not listen to how people talk about cover letters on this site. Cover letters are important, and in many industries you can be damn sure they'll be read. And no, they're not 'fanfic about working in your office', or just re-stating the resume contents in a fancier guise. If you treat them like that, then of course they're not doing much for you. That makes you sound like a syncophantic windbag, and it's not doing anything else to help.

I was trained in the dark arts of the cover letter by my mother, who is a hiring manager. And her training has paid off: I've been consistently told my cover letters are excellent. Let me pass on the wisdom.

The job of a cover letter is to give a prospective employer strictly more information than is on the resume. This is where you take the resume contents and put them into context. You look at the job requirements (you are looking at the job requirements before applying, right?) and look at your resume and ask the question (in your head) "why would a person think this candidate would be good for this job?" and your cover letter is the answer to that question. If you don't answer that question, the hiring manager is going to have to do it themselves, and you have way more information to work with than they do.

This is especially important if you're moving from one industry to another, because then the relevant connections aren't obvious. It's also very important if you're overqualified, because then you can use the letter to say "I know it looks like this job would be too entry-level for me, but I'm interested to pursue it for reasons x, y, and z". You can also use this space to explain away something that might otherwise be disqualifying, like job-hopping or a long break in employment. The tone to strike here is always matter-of-fact and constrained to topic - don't go into detail about health stuff or personal tragedy, just tell them what they need to hear: that this period of your resume was affected by [bad thing] but that it's now in the past and you're looking forward to the next chapter. Remember, one of the things they're trying to learn is whether you'd be content in this role, or whether you'd be miserable and leave after 2 months, which would force them to do all the work of hiring again. You're trying to establish that you will fit right in and not cause problems. Knowing what drew you to this job in particular (and don't just say 'money', that's true for everyone) helps with that.

And the other mistake? Everyone writes cover letters that are too long. One page is fine. Two is the absolute maximum, and that's if you have a lot of specific things to say. It's a waste of your time and theirs to pad it out with fluff. Of my two most recent successful cover letters (i.e. jobs for which I was interviewed) one was 390 words and the other was 550. That's the length of this post. How long did it take me to write this post? About 15 minutes to write, 5 to proof and edit. That's how long you should be spending on a cover letter, maximum.

[2colde]

[sarahmackattack]

I wanted to get a video of this ghost crab but every time I got close to their hole they scuttled back in, so I tried getting clever with it. I made a little sandcastle and shoved my phone into it, hit record, and walked away. Crab was VERY suspicious of this addition to their environment.

[catasters]

[deadpowol]

[tahthetrickster]

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[loredwy]

I cant believe this tweet is how I find out

[would-you-punt-them]

now all the things you guys have told me about american high schools are starting to make sense

[jeaninelatragedia]

holy shit.

[frustratedasatruar]

You're not really supposed to say it this way, because its considered crass, but here in the US children are culturally and legally considered essentially the property of their parents.

Note that its considered more crass to point this out than it is to treat children as property in the first place.

[pangur-and-grim]

alright I'm almost finished Project Hail Mary, and I have to say, I don't get why people are shipping the guy with Markiplier when he's already in a perfectly healthy queer-platonic relationship with the alien spider made of rocks

[pangur-and-grim]

that's insane. we need to change this

[sufjansjoy]

does anybody know how to get out of bed. or be a better person

[sufjansjoy]

wow

[herpsandbirds]

Picasso Moth (Baorisa hieroglyphica), family Noctuidae, Arunchal Pradesh, India

photographs by David Fischer

[baybelletrist]

Americans Are Cutting Down Flock Cameras. The Company Calls Them Terrorists.

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles.

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

Become ungovernable.