If you tilt me just right, I might cast an abolitionist shadow.

Purple, Tapai, 15

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what is your opinion on bears

The older I get the less use I see in this website.  Bears, on the other hand, have been consistently useless to me.

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What's the most unethical thing you can imagine, and under what circumstances would you do it?

Is this an ask meme?  I didn’t volunteer for this ask meme.

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I don’t mind the over-generality very much. People do sometimes say “if I were orange I’d be a doctor”; it’s a bit silly but unless you actually plan on swapping via Miolee it doesn't matter much if your thoughts are vague. My objection when somebody says they'd be a small business owner if purple is “I’ll believe you if you *already are* a small business owner”. Small businesses exist in any caste; why would you think you’d own one only if you were purple?

To be fair, the small business model is more common in purple industries.  You can start smaller if you sell raspberry colas from a cart or just show up at people’s houses on foot with a roller bag of cleaning supplies, and then gradually expand to hire your cousin for a few hours a week, versus if you need medical equipment and a way to sterilize it, or if you need twenty dance students to break even on the cost of renting a practice space.  I needed a loan to start out, since I have an entire café, and my case is probably comparable to someone who gets a loan to open a daycare in the same amount of square footage, but not everyone goes that route.  And if you work alone or with one collaborator, like some indie art greens, you don’t tend to call that “small business ownership”, even though it’s not that much different structurally from selling wooden spoons online.

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I feel like I’ve said this before, but I can’t find it.  It’s such an eyeroll moment when someone says “if I were purple I’d be a small business owner”.  There are a handful of skills common to ownership of any small business, and maybe you think you’d be good at those, sure, but there’s also skills in common to urology and art therapy and I’ve never seen anyone say “if I were orange I’d see patients in some capacity”.

Come on, do you want to be an electrician or a retailer or run a food truck?  Do you want to sell merchandise on PrintDay or prune trees or drive paratransit?  Do you want to clean houses or shine shoes or patch roofs?  If it’s a small business, you’re going to do the jobs of everyone who reports to you because if any of them don’t work out it’s your livelihood on the line and you need to swoop in.  So tell me, Tumblr user @i’d-be-a-small-business-owner-if-i-were-purple, do you see yourself with a print shop or a beverage factory or a fleet of bicycle couriers or a toy repair outfit or an exterminator truck or a glazier’s tools or a sewing machine or a chemical vat or an orchard or a jackhammer?

Or do you just think all purple work is the same, and kind of like bossing people around more than you like being bossed?

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(1/2) This is a really weird question, but I'm having this problem with my boss. Well, not my boss, more a customer, really. I'm a waiter, and there's this orange that comes in, and he's a regular, and I'm new, and-- look I *swear* I'm not lying! He's eating the table decorations! He just sneaks little nibbles of the flower petals when he thinks no one is looking!

(2/2) I went told my boss, and she didn't believe me. And then she was angry at me because keeping the bouquets fresh is my *job* and this one looked *ratty* and-- I'm not crazy, he's *eating* them! I swear on soap! I really just don't know what to do about this. What do I do?

Garnish his plate with a flower and wink.  Or seat him somewhere with plastic flowers, if you have any of those.

[openamenta]

Why are people so obsessed with saving children during disasters?

They don’t really have lives yet. Less resources have been invested in them. They don’t even understand how dying works. They don’t have the same potential as a newborn to satisfy spring, some or all of it was used up.

Why not save more adults, and then let the adults have more babies.

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I open Tumblr, the first thing I see is this sociopath who thinks children are some kind of hormone supplement, I close Tumblr.

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My local cafe said it was serving breadfruit, but it tasted /nothing/ like bread. I feel betrayed.

This took some poking my translator to understand.  We don’t call that plant “bread fruit”; our word is more like “tree potato”.  At any rate, I’m sure you can get bread if bread is what you want.

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I was randomly browsing, and I found some perfect relaxing background music for my salon. But then after I brought it, I realized the artist was from *Miolee*. Do you think I should still play it? I've been trying to decide all afternoon, and you've had your own business a lot longer than I have.

I wouldn’t.  Most people won’t notice, but the ones who do notice might care, and you probably don’t want to filter for the clientele who’d approve!  There’s a lot of music in the world, the best of any given genre isn’t going to be out of Miolee.  Keep looking; good luck!

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Smallness wishes to be henceforth known as Goose.  I don’t actually know why and she says it’s a secret, but I did tell her she could pick.

[blackoutlandish]

That picture of that purple girl in the dress is offensive. idk how she gets off on wearing blue. Fucking rich business owners don't know their place.

In case my followers needed another illustration of why the caste system needs to be burned to the ground, here’s another exhibit for the collection.

[thebloggerisin]

Where does anon get off thinking blues own the colour blue?

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Whether it's common to wear mostly clothes that match your hair seems to vary regionally. I once passed through a small town where it was very normative and it was pretty spooky, like everyone was subject to a dress code. My favorite outfit is yellow and blue, personally.

[openamenta]

People keep assuming I’m hypersensitive just because I care about being clean. It’s so weird. Maybe everyone in my social circle is actually undiagnosed hyposensitive. Would it be rude to tell them I think so?

For example, if I haven’t washed my hands for a couple of hours, I know it’s the official theological consensus that they’re clean, but there’s all that buildup of sweat and oil and every time I touch something there’s a small chance it might have been dirty without my knowledge and besides that there’s just… biology. Germs exist, they’ll grow back to cover my skin in their germy… germiness. Or I might have absentmindedly touched my face and I’ve read that even though your face is supposed to be officially clean there’s a reason you’re not supposed to touch it and then touch things that need to be clean. Just because no one wants to be low-key horrified that their face is unclean I guess most people tune it out and then the theological consensus notices that people don’t have a pollution instinct about their own faces. I’m not wrong here. People just don’t want to admit it, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

And outside of this weird hypo bubble I can’t escape from, it’s normal to care about being clean. It’s normal to not want to go to a hotel because you can’t trust that it’s really clean. Normal people do it anyway when we’re forced to, but it’s normal to lie awake all night trying not to think about what might have happened in that bed and feeling your skin crawl and feeling weirdly guilty about inflicting it on your beloved pajamas.

Outside of my weird hypo bubble it’s completely normal to wash your hands after touching anyone. Outside of my weird hypo bubble people understand that door handles are dirty. Outside my weird hypo bubble people understand that your everything is dirty! You touch it all the time! It only takes one single mistake and it’s polluted forever!

Will someone outside my weird hypo bubble please just confirm for me that you exist and there are other mesosensitive people in the world? That I’m not alone?

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1) You're hypersensitive. Mesosensitive people trust hotels to wash bedclothes and maids to sterilize doorknobs. 2) You can get plastic everything covers, cheaply enough to replace them daily if you like.

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wow, that's so green. what did the author have to say about it?

I don’t think I can usefully summarize it, but the blurb says “Blending traditional epistemology, social science, and interviews with hundreds of widely varied subjects, the author investigates what different kinds of people know and how they know it.”  I hope that helps.

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What's "epistemology"?

The philosophy of knowledge, apparently.

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I don’t think I’m going to finish my current book before the end of spring, so here’s a roundup of what I’ve read this season.

Sound: Science fiction, I wouldn’t really recommend it, it relies on very wooly concepts of the science it fictionalizes and the characters aren’t self-consistent or compelling.  It does have a decent plot if you overlook that.

Trees in the Kopeshai: Guerilla warfare during the Asatsan conflict.  If you really want to know about this in particular, it’s a serviceable explanation, but it didn’t do a very good job of making the topic interesting and I didn’t finish it.

Best in Show: A History of Dog Breeding: What it sounds like.  I wouldn’t read this all in one sitting but it was fun to read a chapter at a time.  Apparently today’s herd hounds aren’t directly related to thirtieth century herd hounds - the breed went extinct when the region’s grazing areas were turned over to the production of cereal grains and then was later reinvented.

Knowing Things: Very green book.  It’s about “epistemology” and different groups’ relationships to it - mostly castes but also age groups and a few countries are covered in simultaneously the most nitpicky yet cursory form possible.  Surprisingly engaging despite that.

collected Poems of sasa moa volume Two: Read it if you like sasa moa.  I do, so I loved it; I’ve been a fan since one of her poems turned up in Swift’s weekly readings when he was in school.

My Understanding: Biography of Suta Ohampei.  It’s the one the musical about her is based on; I went to see it last winter and put the book on my to-read list.  The book isn’t as much fun as the musical, of course, but it’s much more in-depth and I thought it was a great read.

Generation 4: The Mark: I continue to be a sucker for Generation books.  But it seems like she puts them out slower every time.  This one was better than book three but not as good as book two, which is still the best in the series.  Tohan deserves thirty grandchildren and if he doesn’t have them when Generation 6 rolls around I will be annoyed.

...and I seem to have logged a whopping 783 different variants of output from the Little Stories Generator on top of Itty-bitty’s collection of 68 conventionally written board books.  I really recommend the Little Stories Generator - it’s a series of templates that can mix up names and details to make lots of reading to a very small child less repetitive.  Babies up to a year old often like stories that are just very simple repeatable templates, so I’ve read a lot of them that are basically “[so and so] went to the store for [ingredients, materials, or tools] and met [someone] and then used the things to make a [food or project]”, or “[character] went through the [obstacle] and around the [obstacle] and under the [obstacle] until finally they were at [relative or friend’s place]”, but one day it’s Cat and Rabbit making soup and a small witch going through a forest to her grandma’s, and the next day it’s an orange buying yarn to make socks and a sea alien going through a cave to see her schoolmate.

[openamenta]

Why are aftermarket credits even legal? If you’re somehow too irresponsible to use birth control – and it’s not like it’s hard to make a trip to the doctor’s at the start of spring – then you definitely shouldn’t be in the gene pool.

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Some people want to make aftermarket credits good for international adoptions - they'll still be more expensive than native born babies, so people who can engage with the eugenics process of their home country as it was meant to be are encouraged to do that, but people who can't but still have the money can bring in surplus from somewhere that has it. I'm sure there are personal anecdotes I haven't heard that could convince me that it's a good idea to let people buy aftermarket, though. Nineteen year olds with sudden inheritances?

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Itty-bitty is here!  He’s heavier than Swift or Smallness were when they were born, but compared to a toddler (or Smallness, who still likes piggyback rides) he’s like a feather.  A warm kissable feather.

Swift has been predictably hanging out a lot to see Itty-bitty.  He isn’t bringing his girlfriend much; she has a baby nephew this year, which might be all that’s going on, but maybe the relationship’s not holding up as well as they hoped under spring pressure.

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Tapa’s due to be completely free of reds before spring is over.  It’s a huge hassle having to filter them out when I’m trying to hire people, but I’m glad we’re out of our national transition era, however dubious I am about the route we took through it.  It’s just such an uncertain time to be in and I’m looking forward to it being past.