So this is for @glitter-lisp because theyāre feeding me vigilante team awesome content with Varian immediately assigning Hugo his nemesis while Eugene. Begs him to re-examine his feelings because Varian why do you have a shrine dedicated to catching this guy who does minor petty crime. While Hugo just thinks theyāre genuinely playing cat and mouse to be hot and romantic.
But I also used the outfits from @ashdoesfandom vigilante AU because this could totally fit into their story as a time early on in Varigoās working relationship lol
you can have multiple most gorgeous looking women giving performance of their lifetime in a movie or show yet people will still come out obsessing & wanting to fuck a white man with the personality of a wet cardboard
Conservative beauty standards are back with a vengeance which means it's especially important to go out this summer with bellies out and bodies unshaved. Also be unapologetically disabled with mobility aids and wearable medical devices and stim toys and ear defenders and all that stuff. You need it. People need to see it. Everyone needs to be reminded that life is unquestioningly more enjoyable when you're not living inside an arbitrary set of rules created by people who are offended by all the wrong things.
for context the owner said i was hopeless, that i wasnāt doing anything with my life and would go nowhere and that i was bad at my job.
he also raised his voice at me and yelled at me ON shift. and when i told him i no longer wished to speak to him and i got my shift covered he followed me into the parking lot to harass me some more. iāve never EVER made a post like this but genuinely donāt know what else to do. iāve spent 4 years of my life working there. working open - closes, walking there because of my towns shitty transportation, have worked shifts by myself, covered NUMEROUS shifts.
not to mention any time my boss has verbally harassed someone else i have always stuck up for my coworkers. i am out of a stable income in one of the worst economies and he did this all purposefully to degrade and humiliate me because he didnāt like being told he was out unprofessionally and creating a hostile environment.
as a regular donor to Gaza Soup Kitchen I get their email updates, and they said today that while they've continued to be able to expand, donations are slowing down as Gaza gets less coverage. If you have a few dollars to spare, I encourage you to send them here to continue the amazing work that Hani and his team are doing.
literally everything people say about public defenders on the internet is so wrong and frustrating even when theyāre trying to be sympathetic to us. and I certainly said some of that same kind of shit before I did this job. I didnāt get it yet. I get it now. the only people who really do get it are the people whoāve done it and the people who are in or also working with the communities we serve. representing a factually guilty person is the absolute least of any public defenderās fucking problems at any given time and the last thing I would ever lose sleep over lol
what a lot of people in the notes on the post that inspired this train of thought seem to imagine public defenders struggling with and getting upset about: finding out a client committed the crime they're accused of and having to grapple with the morality of defending a person who Did Harm To Others and what that means for the attorney as an individual immortal soul or whatever the fuck
Things that I have actually struggled to deal with in my 2 years as a public defender so far (non-exhaustive list):
Having to put the criminal records and self-esteem and livelihoods of clients I believed were factually innocent, people I'd developed relationships with and knew how much they had to lose if something went wrong, in the hands of a group of strangers who I'd had no more than 20 minutes to question about their knowledge and beliefs and biases.
Worrying those strangers would favor the young, handsome white male prosecutors' arguments over my innocent clients who've had rough lives and it shows on their faces, because of whose voice sounds "authoritative" and who "looks like a criminal".
Never feeling like I had enough time to prepare a case for trial because I also had over 100 other cases pending at the same time.
Put simply, it is harder to represent a factually innocent person than a factually guilty person. I think basically all defense attorneys agree on this. It's more emotionally taxing because of the stakes. There are always material stakes for all of our clients, but for a factually innocent person there are also moral stakes.
Representing people who are technically guilty of the crimes they are charged with, but no one was actually harmed, and maybe the law itself is unfair, and also my client was certainly racially profiled and overcharged. And having to put that in the hands of a jury, because my client wants to maintain whatever dignity they can to the bitter end.
Not being able to just say to the jury, I don't give a fuck whether my client is technically guilty. He's a poor Black man, so he was guilty in the eyes of the American legal system before he was ever arrested. He gets that. I get that. Do you get that? Who gives a shit whether he's factually guilty of a technicality DUI that happened 2 or 3 years ago? What the fuck are we doing? Are we all just here to give another black father a criminal record? Fuck you all.
Representing multiple very young men charged with DV assaults who grew up with fathers who abused their mothers, or parents who abused them, in and out of foster care, multiple generations of cycles of violence and substance abuse passed down from parent to child. It doesn't excuse it. Of course it doesn't. They have done harm to their own partners and they know this isn't the example they want to set for their own kids. But they're human - the idea that abusers are somehow inhuman just sets you up to fail to recognize abuse when someone you love is the person doing it - and what the fuck other ways of dealing with difficult situations and relating to other people were these guys ever supposed to learn? They didn't have the opportunity to learn anything else. They never had a fucking chance.
And if they don't have a lot of history yet, maybe there's still time to turn it around. One of them talked to me about how badly he wanted to break the cycle and not have his kids grow up to be like that. I hope he can do it. I don't know if he will. That's what haunts me about that situation. Not the fact that I had to represent his interests in court. That's just my job.
Family after family after family who call 911 for help for a loved one in a mental health or substance-related crisis. And then the cops show up and throw their loved one in crisis in jail sometimes over the weekend because if you lash out at someone you live with for literally any reason that counts as domestic violence which means the cops legally have to arrest someone. And 24-72 hours later the family is in court upset telling the judge if they knew this would happen they never would have called 911. Cannot stress enough this happens like weekly in misdemeanor court.
A prosecutor submitting victim impact statements for the sentencing of a colleague's client who absolutely had killed their partner, and it was awful - but the victim impact statements were provided by the victim's family, many of whom she was estranged from, and many of them misgendered and deadnamed their dead "loved one". And the prosecutor just threw them all into the public record unredacted. Because of pressure to "listen to victims", in this case coming from the transphobic family.
A 16-year-old getting held in juvenile detention on unproven charges an 18-year-old would get released from adult jail on, because while the 18-year-old is presumed to have the autonomy to find another place to stay, if the charge is related to someone who lives in the 16-year-old's parents' house - or their parents straight-up just don't want them going home - well, then, they can't go home, which means they have nowhere to go. so let's keep them in jail.
On the flip side, having 18-year-olds get released to homelessness because their well-intentioned parents called the cops for whatever reason (see above) and now the court is imposing a no-contact order with someone who lives at their house.
A kid who got pulled over and charged with DUI/physical control of a motor vehicle while under the influence on her 18th birthday. She was a senior in high school. She had never been in trouble before. She had no criminal record. The law doesn't require someone to be booked and held in jail for a first-time DUI charge with no history, so the jail's policy is that they usually don't do that. If it was just the DUI she would have been cited and released. But the cop also cited her for 2 counts of minor in possession. So, because she had non-DUI charges, I guess, they booked and held her in jail. If it had been just one day earlier she would have been in juvenile detention. She cried. I almost cried. I sat in the attorney meeting booth with her for an extra half hour until they kicked us out for the lunchtime visiting area closure, just so she could be in a quiet space with a friendly face instead of back in the adult jail dorm. That was all I could do.
Tiny old people in jail. Tiny old people, deep in dementia, deeply upset, who got angry - personality changes including becoming very quick to anger are common with dementia - lashed out at family members and got arrested on domestic violence charges. (Again, see above.) And all I could see was my own late grandmother, who was a tiny old lady with dementia who lashed out all the time, but she was a rich white lady who could afford to live in a home with professional caregivers who were trained to handle those situations and deescalate, instead of having to rely on overwhelmed family members. And getting praise from teammates for how well I handled those clients and their jail hearings, and knowing it was because there but for the grace of god go we.
A guy who stole 2 beers from a grocery store, products that cost like $13 total, getting held on $1000 bail because he has warrants in other counties. $1000 bail when he's charged with taking $13 worth of beer. From a gigantic corporation. And he stayed in jail. Because if someone is stealing from a grocery store, they probably don't have $1000 to pay.
I think people who talk about the moral conundrum of public defenders get too stuck on the defender part and forget the public. Public defenders, by definition, simply do not represent the worst of the worst. People who hurt others because they can, quite literally can, because frankly most of them don't end up getting arrested and prosecuted for the ways they hurt people in the first place. And if they do, they can usually afford to hire a private defense attorney. I think most of us know the actual statistics about rape and abuse reporting, but for some reason that goes out the window when people talk about public defenders. (The reason is racism.)
Acting with (perceived) impunity is a privilege. It's for rich (and mostly white) people. The vast majority of crimes prosecuted in the U.S. are crimes of poverty and addiction (and that includes many violent crimes - yes, really), and that vast majority is where public defenders operate. There aren't moral quandaries in knowing what our clients did. The part that hurts is understanding the systems that have led them to this place, and knowing what those systems are going to keep doing to them once their case is resolved, and not being able to do jack shit to stop it.
āļø happy pride month turns out I Saw The TV Glow is free to watch on youtube and has been for at least three months now and i did not know until just now
Please don't forget about loveless people this pride month. Love doesn't make us human. People don't need to love in "other" ways to be valid. Some people are aplatonic, some afamilial, some asensual, some are heartless. They still belong. Abolish conformity and the idea that someone needs to be something specific to belong at pride.
March 2026 was the first month that renewables generated more power than natural gas in the US. In fact, fossil fuels generated less energy this past March than they had in any March for the previous 25 years.
As clean energy continues to grow (over 90% of energy capacity added to the US grid this year will be renewables) we will see more and more months like this.
Time for a post that doesn't comply with the gimmick...
So, companies are tracking you no matter what you do, but this specifically is something I care about deeply.
Essentially, when you share a link, sometimes it has extra data that tracks where it comes from and goes.
Opening Spotify, clicking the first item, and using the share button, I get something like open.spotify.com/track/4P0f1HTaA2UwtLJGryNgJZ?si=DBvbfihOSweU1KHj9Mib8w
That ?si=...........ā¦. is the tracker. It tells Spotify who clicks on the link and ties it to you, meaning Spotify knows who your friends are even if you never follow them.
Similarly, if on Amazon or EBay in the browser, I get something like www.ebay.com/itm/146493392451?_skw=lenovo&itmmeta=............&hash=item................&itmprp=enc..............
And, similarly, everything after the question mark is tracking you. I had to blank it out because it was so long!
There is an exception for a few things (I.E. the v=..... on YouTube, but not the si=..... on YouTube)
The general rule is delete everything after the ? and if it breaks, add something back.
Firefox users, when you right-click to copy a URL, it will give you the option to "copy clean link" which does what prev describes for you automatically. 10/10.
This is leaving out the most crucial piece of why that was a normal reality: UNIONS.
Union participation percentage is a measly 10% across all industries for the latest statistics in 2025.
Unions are the ones who could fight against the requirement for everyone and their mother to need a minimum of a bachelor's degree. they could fight for working hours to be properly compensated so that the work week was actually 40 hours or less and everything over was actually paid for.
The reality of the work place and why we work so much more for so much less is because we are not unionized. the reason europeans seem to have it so much better is because of their strong union culture.
there are solutions to these problems and we need to stop obscuring the why.
āFor New York City Pride in 1994 (Stonewall 25), Baker created a mile-long rainbow flag that was carried down First Avenue in Manhattan. During the parade, Baker used scissors to cut segments from the flag to be rushed to Fifth Avenue for an impromptu protest march in front of St. Patrickās Cathedral, the headquarters of New York Cityās anti-gay Catholic archdiocese.
^āAt the bottom of the image is the segment of the flag cut for the St. Patrickās Cathedral protest. Photograph by Mick Hicksā
āGilbert Baker wearing a white sequined dress (right) and other protestors triumphantly march the cut pieces of the mile-long flag past St. Patrickās Cathedral. Photograph by Charles Bealā
wonder twins conflict is always so interesting 2 me because nobody else can get donna to drop her all-american-perfect-girl shtick and actually exhibit (loudly and explosively) negative emotions like dickie does
and dick who turns so cruel and cutting with his insults when really pushed can somehow hold them back when itās donna
most performative people in the world but they can never keep up their defence mechanism facades with each other
Cowabummer, Dude @waterberry-strawmelon - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
