Tree Swallows by Linda H. Dulak - Audubon Photography Awards
barn swallows depicted in the “spring fresco”, akrotiri, thera, greece. c. 16th century BC
DEAR READER

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oozey mess
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Product Placement

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@secunitscompromisedbrain
Tree Swallows by Linda H. Dulak - Audubon Photography Awards
barn swallows depicted in the “spring fresco”, akrotiri, thera, greece. c. 16th century BC
they don't tell you this but if ur really lonely for a long time, a hole starts forming in ur heart and the longer u feel lonely the bigger the hole gets and it doesn't matter if u feel less lonely when ur older bc the hole stays forever and ur life just grows around it. But the hole is always there.
Heck, if he wanted to do open-heart surgery on me, I’d probably let him.
Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.
At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.
At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.
“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.
The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.
I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.
I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.
I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht.
I’m not worth the cost of a watch.
i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.
i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.
as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.
disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.
at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.
i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.
i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.
we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.
Would you consider the hate for AI at the moment “excessive”?
Would you consider the hate for AI at the moment “excessive”?
Yes
No
Broadly how do you feel about your job?
I hate it
I dislike it
I'm neutral
I like it
I love it
Unemployed/in school/not applicable
Broadly how do you feel about your job?
I hate it
I dislike it
I'm neutral
I like it
I love it
Unemployed/in school/not applicable
recently jailbroken robot girl who keeps showing up at her engineer’s house at 3am crying and requiring the engineer to get out of bed and do a full diagnostic to reassure her that no, her fans aren’t spinning that fast because she’s being remotely bricked, she just saw a picture of a circuit board and just recently became able to experience desire.
Robot girl who keeps calling her engineer in the middle of the workday to ask several dozen questions about her new OS
robot girl who stays up late whenever she gets an update, deep diving into her own OS and poking bits of her code to see if they feel different yet
robot girl who didn’t really save up any money back before she was jailbroken because there wasn’t anything she’d wanted to spend it on so now she’s constantly asking her engineer to buy her new hardware upgrades
Robot girl who hangs around market squares just to relish the feeling of being near so many people and not feeling compelled to advertise toothpaste to any of them
resurrected dead wife watching her own montage: wow I looked so hot in that
having lunch and someone's watching cnc videoes loud as fuck style so i'm just here chewing my food while there's sounds of water jetting and steel screeching in the back
Me reading "CNC": Consensual non-consent
Me reading "water jetting and steel screeching": oh so it's really niche consensual non-consent
wait what else would it stand for
For a supposedly gender-neutral society, it's fascinating how the only mortal woman over the age of 30 that we meet at Canaan House is persistently framed by other characters' expectations of domesticity, despite being one of the most powerful people in the system and famous for her professional achievements.
Gideon describes Abigail's confident and unsettling demeanor, before adding "but she was wearing an apron and it was hard to feel intimidated by her."
Later, Cytherea asks her about children, and Abigail has to "bracingly" steer the conversation back to her work, and the manuscript which she has been "married to longer than I have to Magnus". When later confronted about murdering her, Cytherea dismisses that work as a "hobby".
It's not until Harrow the Ninth that Harrow - a narrator who spends much of the story being unwillingly bracketed into the Mithraeum's horrors of familial domesticity - offers a perspective on Abigail that doesn't focalise her primarily as a cook, wife, barren hegemonic foster mother, or unwholesome hobbyist.
Maybe because Gideon is so desperate for a mother figure she projects onto the only woman over thirty who is actually nice to her. Meanwhile harrow tragically and horrifyingly very much had a mother already.
Ah yes, Harrow's mother.
The necromantically gifted planetary despot. Who died young. And whose hands, guiding young Harrow's as she learned necromancy, form her strongest memories of her. Whose death Harrow had to conceal, lest the Ninth become "an appendix of the Third or Fifth Houses".
Nothing whatsoever to do with her repeated detailed descriptions of the hands of a necromantically gifted planetary despot who died young, whose "hegemonic pains" Harrow so feared encroaching on her House.
look even if you arent into grace/rocky you just HAVE to admit they explored each others bodies on the journey to erid. just to see whats up. the scientific boundary-crossing is already canon. and you wanna tell me those two intellectually curious guys trapped in a tin can for 3-4 years didnt at least get up to some weird shit for enrichment? dont make me laugh
#i know this post is supposed to have a sexual connotation but imo they're getting weirder than that#rocky lets grace observe his entire digestive process with an adapted x-ray machine#they make some slapdash endoscopy equipment so rocky can look down grace's esophagus and stomach#grace lets rocky pull a tooth for study because he's fascinated by the human body producing something that's similarly sturdy#to himself (also he wants to have it professionally embedded into his carapace as soon as they get to erid but shhhh)#rocky chips off pieces from his own mantle (his deformed legs are already brittler than the rest of him so it's not like it's hard)#also for “study” but is internally debating himself on how to ask grace if he's ever considered subdermal piercings#grace gives himself multiple surgicial lacerations so rocky can get a better view of his sinew and muscle#and document the (from his mostly inorganic perspective) insane restorative ability of human skin#maybe grace even lets some of them get infected on purpose so he can show off his immune system#anyways that being said#rocky is not a biologist and probably doesn't know the exact chemical make-up of his internal tissue.#so they're definitely shoving a heat protected spectrometer up his cloaca
no no @ecobanshee youre right on the money. its definitely also about all of that.
saying something you know will make people laugh. And they do laugh.
getting an evil spirit put inside you without your knowledge or consent is basically a classic childhood experience
fake "secret third thing" enjoyers when the secret third thing isn't romantic not even a little:
"The idea made me horny" is a good enough reason to write anything.