This is actually a very harmful thing that you should NEVER do to children. This is teaching children to not trust people, it’s going to cause lasting damage to their relationships with you and others, and it also increases the likely of them developing a cynical paradigm (something that is proven to shorten lifespan). I know kids can be difficult but this is not okay. You wouldn’t do this to an adult and would recognize it as cruel to an adult, it’s so much worse to do it to a child.
There was a kid in my kindergarten class who once said something along the lines of “My mom says only babies care about promises.” after promising to do something and not following through. Which is a really horrible thing to say and believe at that age, and I definitely remember the gist of the phrase more than whatever it was she was supposed to do and didn’t do! But at the time, I wasn’t thinking “oh wow her mom is a dick that’s a fucked up thing to tell a kid” I was thinking “I cannot ever trust this person” and! As it turns out! I did not, in fact, ever trust this person again. I do not think, if I met this person on the street now, that I would trust them even though I haven’t seen them in probably over a decade.
And yeah, I hold grudges tae fuck, but kids imitate behavior and if your behavior is to be untrustworthy, your kids aren’t likely to learn trustworthy behavior from their peers because their peers won’t model it for them.
Jaskier: do you know how many times I’ve almost died travling with you???? Nearly three hundred years alive and I can count on one hand the number of times I was in mortal danger-
Geralt: wait wha-
Jaskier: don’t interrupt me I’m mad at you for abandoning me! Nearly three hundred years and then twenty years with you and I’ve lost count! But you don’t see me abandoning you or calling you a burden!! Because I own up to my choices instead of blaming others when things go wrong because you’re actively trying to tell destiny to fuck off >:(
Geralt: you’re right, absolutely, I want to apologize for that but I’m begging you to back track and explain some things
when I was a kid, my dad told me that if they ever reinstated the draft (and included women in said draft) that I had his support if I went out and did some minor crime to get arrested so I’d no longer be able to be drafted. I think it’s important to have those kinds of conversations with kids. I might have had a lot of dumb ideas and misguided opinions growing up, but I always knew it was morally worse to contribute to the US war machine than it was to break a law.
May I also add:
* note: these are current disqualifiers to the U.S. military, and upon a draft they may be more lenient, unfortunately *
• Depression
• ADHD
• Personality disorder
• Low credit score (I don’t know what number range)
• Certain injuries or surgery history
• Vision impaired (to what extent I don’t know)
• Hearing impaired (to what extent I don’t know)
• Asthma
• Overweight (I don’t know what they qualify as overweight)
• Unability to pass their physical
• Pregnant
• Stretched ears
• Tattoos on face, neck, hands
Important
Bringing this back
It’s hard to tell what their standards are for a draft, but…
Being over weight is probably the easiest way to avoid service. The army hates fat people, especially if you’re making little progress losing weight.
Mental and physical illness should be documented. Bring your documentation to prove it, otherwise they might not care. If it comes to it, plenty of people pretend they’re NOT disabled to get IN; I give you permission to do the opposite.
You will be tested on your ability to stretch and bend and your ankle stability will be tested. Feel free to pretend you have poor flexibility in your ankles preventing you from doing their stretches, or like it really hurts your back or something. All of your limbs will be tested for rotation; act like you cant make a full rotation.
Eyes can be pretty bad as long as you’re corrected to 20/20. One of my eyes is naturallu 20/200, which would be legally blind if I didnt have my glasses, and that was fine. Maybe bring an old pair of glasses you can’t see from very well; either way be sure to squint a lot and do poorly on the eye exam.
For hearing, they put you in a booth and tell you to press a button when you hear a tone. Just…. dont do that. Or do it REALLY late.
Asthma is the other big deal. You dont even need asthma; say you’ve had bronchitis a few times and need an inhaler occasionally. You’re out.
Remember that having certain types of surgery disqualifies you, so if you’ve got like… a surgical pin in a bone or something put that front and center.
What other ailments do you have? Constant gastrointestinal issues? Pigeon toed? Frequent…anal fissures?? (Yes, that’s a consideration) dont be embarrassed to lay it all out: nothing is more embarrassing than serving the military.
Finally, incontinence is your get out of jail free card. Has all else failed? Literally piss yourself. The army does not want to deal. Not even a little.
which not only.. blocks popups. but also has this thing called “Remove Overlay” when u right click which works a good 99% of the time in my experience in getting rid of paywalls.
75% of the time if something is paywalled, fucking around in developer mode looking for a link to the real thing or finding and deleting the content blocker works like a charm
I like how it’s described as a union could “cripple American Capitalism” when more precisely it’s just that a union would be so powerful as to force WalMart (or any other company) to pay their workers like human beings. That’s not going to break Walmart. They’ll barely notice.
They’ve successfully convinced us that the unions are the greedy monsters. For so many years, the companies have painted unions as “we want you to pay janitors three million dollars a year and if you don’t we’ll set your stores on fire”.
But it’s more like “We want you to take an almost imperceptible fraction of your bountiful profits and use it to make your employees’ live marginally better, and maybe give them medical benefits, y’know, so they don’t die”.
Big companies did not stop hiring ten year olds to work in coal mines because they just woke up one day and said “my god, we’re monsters”. They did it because their workers stood together and said “really, enough of this crap”.
Companies are not going to give people raises unless it’s economically necessary that they do so. Anything they can do to lower their expenses, and raise their profits, they are going to do. And no one person can stop them.
But thousands of people, millions of people? Better chances.
I am dead serious: If you are a Walmart employee, at any level and in any store — like if you are a high school kid with a part time job stocking shelves — message me any question you have about unions. Like ask me “What’s a union” if you want. I will explain it to you.
I am a grievance chair for a white collar union whose workplace only unionized within the last five years and whose management fought as every step of the way, but in the end we fucking won. It can be done, and I can tell you how.
Just another reminder that Walmart Germany was a spectacular fail because of ver.di (which is a national service trade union that has it’s control over almost all trade and service companies in Germany) among other things.
Like, ver.di essentially came up to the CEO of Walmart Germany and was like “Hi, welcome, we wish you the best and that we can work together well :)” and the dude was like “hahaha no” and tried to pull the american concept here so ver.di pulled out a list of all the breaches of german law that Walmart was doing (underpaying workers, trying to avoid paying health care by using part-timers, trying to be open for more than 80 hours per week, firing people on short notice without warning or exit payments, etc) and long story short, they got some massive hefty fines for it. They also set up a list of demands for the workers and organized national strikes to push them through, making the employees of 85 hypermarkets neatly stand in front of the store doors with signs, whistles and chants (and certainly not the “Wallmart! Wallmart!” chant). In the end, that plus other things caused them to bail after 9 years with a gigantic loss (almost a billion just from sales) from one of the best retail markets in the world.
So all those issues like “no healthcare” or “work full-time and need food stamps” or “work on sundays and holidays” and shit? Unions are there to set their foot down against that for you. They are there to keep you safe from the corps wrath while fighting for your rights.
Cause if you, an individual, complain, they just fire you and laugh about it. A union is a collection of hundreds up to MILLIONS of people, supported by lawyers, going against employers for you.
Went to the Aboriginal artifact exhibit in Chicago. And it’s interesting. How many blankets and masks and totem poles say ‘unknown source’, because every five seconds my mom would stop and point to something and say. “Pauline’s grandmother made that,” or, “That belongs to Mike’s family, I should call him” because. It’s all stolen
“These artifacts were excavated by archaeologists from a burial site in the 1970’s. The remains were returned for reinterment”
Okay cool, cool cool. So you just, like. Dug up the grave of a respected family member, stripped them naked, mailed their body back to their family and kept everything they were lovingly put to rest in. Like a graverobbing bastard
Reminds me of the time when of the elders from my hometown started touching a totem pole in the Museum of Anthropology out at UBC and got yelled at by the staff, only to tell him that the pole had been stolen off of the front of her bighouse when she was ten years old.
Museum collectors did the equivalent of kidnapping a family member when they were away fishing.
Wherein Teen Vogue runs circles around the NYT in journalistic integrity.
Teen Vogue and Cosmo aren’t pulling any punches on reporting on Barron’s Dad. Remember when Cosmo also tried to ask tough interview questions to Ivanka and she hung up on them?
Who says young women’s magazines are still useless and trite?
Fuck the NYT, I might subscribe to Teen Vogue instead.
Teen Vogue also ran stories about culturally appropriated trends by modeling them on girls of the ethnicity they were stolen from (cornrows, “boxer braids,” jelled baby hairs, etc) AND they recently ran an interview with two young Native American women who are at Standing Rock to inform their subscribers of what’s really going at the DAPL protests. Teen Vogue is fucking KILLING it in journalism rn
“we didn’t know any better,” the crewman says, and swallows, presenting the chest to the captain. “what do we do now?”
“kill it,” the captain says, but the ice is melting in his eyes.
“we can’t,” the first mate says desperately, praying she won’t have to fight her captain on this. “we can’t. we - i won’t. we won’t.”
“i know.”
x
“daddy,” she says, floating in a tub of seawater in the hold, “daddy, la-la, la-la-la.”
her voice rings like bells. her accent is strange; her mouth isn’t made for human words. it mesmerises even the hardiest amongst them and she wasn’t even trying. the crew has taken to diving for shellfish near the shorelines for her; she loves them, splitting the shells apart with strength seen in no human toddler, slurping down the slimy molluscs inside and laughing, all plump brown cheeks and needle-sharp teeth. she sometimes splashes them for fun with her smooth, rubbery brown tail. even when they get soaked they laugh. they love her.
“daddy,” she calls again, and he can hear the worry in her voice. the storm rocking the ship is harsh and uncaring, and if they go down, she would be the only survivor.
“don’t worry,” he says, and goes over, sitting next to the tub. the first mate, leaning against the wall, pretends not to notice as he quietly begins to sing.
x
“father,” she says, one day, as she leans on the edge of the dock and the captain sits next to her, “why am I here?”
“your mother abandoned you,” he says, as he always has. “we found you adrift, and couldn’t bear to leave you there.”
she picks at the salt-soaked boards, uncertain. her hair is pulled back in a fluffy black puff, the white linen holding it slipping almost over one of her dark eyes. one of her first tattoos, a many-limbed kraken, curls over her right shoulder and down her arm, delicate tendrils wrapped around her calloused fingertips. “alright,” she says.
x
“why am I really here?” she asks the first mate, watching the sun set over the water in streaks of liquid metal that pooled in the troughs of the waves and glittered on the seafoam.
“we didn’t know any better,” the first mate says, staring into the water. “we didn’t know- we didn’t know anything. we didn’t understand why she fought so viciously to guard her treasure. we could not know she protected something a thousand times more precious than the purest gold.”
she wants to be furious, but she can’t. she already knew the answer, from reading the guilt in her father’s eyes and the empty space in her own history. and she can’t hate her family.
“it’s alright,” she says. “i do have a family, anyways. i don’t think i would have liked my other life near as much.”
x
her kraken grows, spreading its tendrils over her torso and arms. she grows too, too large to come on board the ship without being hauled up in a boat from the water. she sings when the storms come and swims before the ship to guide it to safety. she fights off more than one beast of the seas, and gathers a set of scars across her back that she bears with pride. “i don’t mind,” she says, when the captain fusses over her, “now i match all of you.”
the first time their ship is threatened, really threatened, is by another fleet. a friend turned enemy of the first mate. “we shouldn’t fight him,” she says, peering through the spyglass.
“why not?” the mermaid asks.
“he’ll win,” the first mate says.
the mermaid tips her head sideways. Her eyes, dark as the deep waters, gleam in the noon light. “are you sure?” she asks.
x
the enemy fleet surrenders after the flagship is sunk in the night, the anchor ripped off the ship and the planks torn off the hull. the surviving crew, wild-eyed and delirious, whimper and say a sea serpent came from the water and attacked them, say it was longer than the boat and crushed it in its coils. the first mate hears this and has to hide her laughter. the captain apologizes to his daughter for doubting her.
“don’t worry,” she says, with a bright laugh, “it was fun.”
x
the second time, they are pushed by a storm into a royal fleet. they can’t possibly fight them, and they don’t have the time to escape.
“let me up,” the mermaid urges, surfacing starboard and shouting to the crew. “bring me up, quickly, quickly.”
they lower the boat and she piles her sinous form into it, and uses her claws to help the crew pull her up. once on the deck she flops out of the boat and makes her way over to the bow. the crew tries to help but she’s so heavy they can barely lift parts of her.
she crawls up out in front of the rail and wraps her long webbed tail around the prow. the figurehead has served them well so far but they need more right now. she wraps herself around the figurehead and raises her body up into the wind takes a breath of the stinging salt air and sings.
the storm carries her voice on its front to the royal navy. they are enchanted, so stunned by her song that they drop the rigging ropes and let the tillers drift. the pirates sail through the center of the fleet, trailing the storm behind them, and by the time the fleet has managed to regain its senses they are buried in wind and rain and the pirates are gone.
x
she declines guns. instead she carries a harpoon and its launcher, and uses them to board enemy ships, hauling her massive form out of the water to coil on the deck and dispatch enemies with ruthless efficiency. her family is feared across all the sea.
x
“you know we are dying,” the captain says, looking down at her.
she floats next to the ship, so massive she could hold it in her arms. her eyes are wise.
“i know,” she says, “i can feel it coming.”
the first mate stands next to the captain. she never had a lover or a child, and neither did he, but to the mermaid they are her parents. she will always love her daughter. the tattoos are graven in dark swirls across the mermaid’s deep brown skin and the flesh of her tail, even spiraling onto the spiked webbing on her spine and face. her hair is still tied back, this time with a sail that could not be patched one last time.
“we love you,” the first mate says simply, looking down. her own tightly coiled black hair falls in to her face; she shakes the locs out of the way and smiles through her tears. the captain pretends he isnt crying either.
“i love you too,” the mermaid says, and reached up to pull the ship down just a bit, just to hold them one last time.
“guard the ship,” the captain says. “you always have but you know they’re lost without you.”
“without you,” the mermaid corrects, with a shrug that makes waves. “what will we do?”
“i don’t know,” the captain says. “but you’ll help them, won’t you?”
“of course i will,” she scoffs, rolling her eyes. “i will always protect my family.”
x
the captain and the first mate are gone. the ship has a new captain, young and fearless - of the things she can afford to disregard. she fears and loves the ocean, as all captains do. she does not fear the royal fleet. and she does not fear the mermaid.
“you know, i heard stories about you when i was a little girl,” she says, trailing her fingers in the water next to the dock.
the mermaid stares at her with one eye the size of a dinner table. “is that so?” she hums, smirking with teeth sharper than the swords of the entire navy.
“they said you could sink an entire fleet and that you had skin tougher than dragon scales,” the new captain says, grinning right back at the monster who could eat her without a moment’s hesitation. “i always thought they were telling tall tales.”
“and now?”
“they were right,” the new captain says. “how did they ever befriend you?”
the mermaid smiles, fully this time, her dark eyes gleaming under the white linen sail. “they didn’t know any better.”
She protects her family.
Hi everybody! Guess what’s being posted on AO3 now at the following link!
That’s right! Here you go. I’ll be uploading it in some chunks, because I want to make sure I have everything I wanted edited cleanly finished, but follow the story there!
heads up: if you have rude things to say to people who didn’t know the information you do, please keep it to yourself. we learn through teaching, not through shame.
any comments about how people dying of covid-19 is due to poor hygiene is getting blocked. washing your hands is to protect not only yourself, but other people who are at infinitely more risk of dying from the virus than you, much like how people who don’t get vaccines aren’t the ones dying from preventable disease, it’s the ones who CAN’T get vaccines who have it spread to them. those people’s immune systems can’t take a vaccine in the first place.
here’s a handy chart on the best practices for hand washing! a large part of people don’t do it correctly and it’s not always life or death, but with the incredibly infectious nature of COVID-19 it doesn’t hurt to familiarize yourself with the proper way to do it!
handwashing can dramatically lower the risk of contracting coronavirus because it’s an enveloped virus, it’s specifically surrounded in a lipid (fat) and the majority of soaps are designed to break up grease and fat bonds which means if you break up that outer layer? the virus dies! it’s not super hardy without that outer layer, so washing your hands beyond just physically removing the virus, kills it as well if you use soap.
I am not an expert in immunology - I follow doctors for that.
But I did spend 9 years as a manager at a pizza place that paid better than average wages for food service.
And I am terrified of #COVID19.
Not because the virus is going to kill people, but because poverty might. / Y'all, all laws aside, nobody in the restaurant industry goes to the doctor when they’re sick.
There are health code rules about what symptoms exclude you from work - you have to go to the doctor and get cleared, or be symptom free for 24 hours.
And they are *never* followed. / The people making your food do not have health insurance. Restaurants almost never offer it.
They do not have paid time off. Benefits like that aren’t imaginable.
They do not have enough people in the schedule to cover an absence. “Lean Staffing.” It’s more profitable. / The average age of a fast-food worker is 29. The average income is $8.69 an hour. I was taxed around 21% on paychecks.
The average doctor’s visit w/o insurance, costs $300-600.
43.7 hours. At minimum, more than a week’s take-home pay.
Going to the doctor is an *insane luxury*. I have watched people PRIDE themselves on working through illness and injury. I had a driver break his foot by stepping on a tennis ball in someone’s driveway, and then work another four days on a broken foot on ibuprofen and spite.
Flu-like symptoms?
Fuck out of here. MOST fast food workers are already on some kind of public assistance.
Many of those are “means tested” and require them to keep jobs.
laborcenter.berkeley.edu/pdf/2013/fast_… This means that
1) Fast food workers literally cannot afford to go to the doctor. They will do what we’ve always done - dose up heavily on DayQuil, puke in the bathroom, explain things away as being “hung over” or “tired,” and their manager will pretend nothing is wrong. 2) Fast food workers literally cannot afford to miss work. The median age is 29 for christ’s sake. These are people with bills, families, responsibilities.
Median 2-bedroom rent is ~1,194/mo. That $8.69 wage is ~1,190/mo take-home pay.
Even w/ roommates, that’s HALF YOUR MONEY. You can’t afford to take off work to go to the doctor, much less take off work when the doctor says you need to be quarantined for three weeks. You need every hour.
Otherwise you lose your job, then your housing, and anything else that keeps the wolf away from the door. When this happened to me, the doctor said I needed to be off my feet and resting for two weeks, light duty for another two.
I took 4 days. It was one of two times in nine years I missed work, both of them involving a trip to the emergency room.
People who work food service are less likely to have reliable transportation - so they ride mass transit, exposing themselves to more people.
They live together in tight spaces, ensuring it spreads between folks.
They have poor diets, poor sleep, and weakened immune systems. ~14mil people work in food service in the US. They’re in every community. Everyone has to eat.
They live and work in conditions that make the spread of disease inevitable.
They won’t go to the doctor until it’s a crisis, long after they’ve passed things on to others. The Flu is bad enough, going around a kitchen.
#COVID19 is substantially more easily transmitted than the flu.
And we’ve created a situation where food service workers’ SURVIVAL depends on doing THE EXACT OPPOSITE of anything that could fight a pandemic. And these are the people making your food. The average food service worker is a millenial. 62% of us live paycheck to paycheck.
And it doesn’t have to be like this. In our parents’ lifetimes, it wasn’t.
God Bless the Conservative movement and their deregulation, pro-business legislation, and “choice.” Poverty is a public health crisis, y'all. Wage Slavery kills.
And if you can’t be bothered to care about that out of your basic human dignity, maybe the fact that the servile class you’ve been supported by can’t afford to not make you sick will fucking help.
I’m a barista at a very large and famous coffee company (y’all know the one) and we are, technically speaking, supposed to have it lucky. Because we get paid time off and some of us do have health care.
Except paid time off doesn’t kick in until you’ve been with the company for a year. You are only eligible for health care if you work over twenty hours a week. And even with all this—at my store, the “work through the pain” mentality is SO STRONG, y’all.
I have gotten sick because supervisors have come to work sick; we pass it back and forth to each other, and try to blame it on the cold or the changing weather. I have had to call out maybe twice—once because I was new and sneezing and coughing and my friends were all telling me that it was irresponsible to go in, and once because a cold had ravaged my voice so badly I sounded like Kermit the frog’s evil twin. Both times I did exactly what I was supposed to do: called my manager with plenty of advance notice. The first time, she guilted me into coming in anyway, saying that she would try to find coverage for me but that it wasn’t likely she’d be able to. I struggled through four hours of that shift before my nicest coworker showed up early so that I could go home and get some rest. The second time, I got the day off, but had to cover 8- and 9-hour shifts the next two days to “make up for it.”
This is how we are staffed: we don’t have enough people to cover absences. If any of us is sick we will absolutely come into work—and I am stunningly, immensely privileged in that I was able to try to get out of working: most of my coworkers have kids and families that they need to provide for.
If Coronavirus spreads in the US, your friendly neighborhood baristas will be behind the counters. We will be smiling, stifling coughs, making drinks that we’ll be trying not to sneeze on, and running to the back to blow our noses, wash our hands, and get back out there, because you can’t run the floor with just two people during peak.
broke: only slash three tires because if you slash all four then insurance will cover it but they won’t cover three (this is literally not true btw and could serve to establish in court that you were slashing their tires to cause maximum financial damage as opposed to an emotional rage)
woke: slash all four tires because fuck em
bespoke: slash two tires diagonally opposite from each other. nobody has more than one spare, it’s impossible to get up on jacks, and trying to drive it will destroy the undercarriage as it rocks back and forth and slams into the ground
true ending: don’t fucking slash tires because they’re under insane amounts of pressure and putting a knife between yourself and an exploding tire is a bad idea. just get a pair of clippers and cut the valve stem to cause an unfixable leak like a normal person
and my immediate thought was “okay so if someone is acquitted the state is like ‘we shouldn’t have to cover the cost of their stay in the prison because they shouldn’t have been there in the first place” which is, of course, utterly fucked up.
this is “we’re billing the guilty for their stay; the acquitted should have to pay us for their stay too”
so yeah not only does mass incarceration thrive off of prisoners’ free labor it also thrives off of prisons billing inmates like some sort of fucking Holiday Inn
So I told one of my managers yesterday that I would be needing time of work this Tuesday to go and vote because I didn’t realize I was scheduled for a long shift and won’t be off before the polls close.
She then proceeds to ask me why I couldn’t early vote.
I tell her that I guess I could have but I didn’t and the option was now closed and my next and last chance is Tuesday.
Cue her giving me a hard time for not early voting.
I politely tell her that I didn’t so I’ll be requiring time off on Tuesday.
Her response?
“I mean we’ll try to get you out.”
Umm no.
I say - “Legally the law requires that you allow me time off work to go vote.”
Her response?
“Yes, I mean legally it does.”
Yes bitch, legally! As in the law! As in it is my right!
So whatever, I leave her office with a bad taste in my mouth and run into a coworker (who’s worked there as long as I’ve been alive), and I tell her about what happened.
She goes OFF, tells me I better make sure they let me go vote Tuesday and that if they try to fight me on it to tell them to look in their files for the law that she printed off for them years ago stating my right to do so.
So she leaves and I feel a bit better but just for shits and giggles I decide to look up the law for Tennessee voting rights (I knew it was a law that they have to let you off but I didn’t know the exact parameters.)
You know what Tennessee law says?
Up to three hours PAID time to go vote, (and my dumb ass was planning on clocking out.)
You best believe that if someone tries to argue with me Tuesday I’ll be slapping down a copy of that law and my ACLU membership card, I’m pretty sure they don’t want to be hearing from those lawyers.
For Traitor: neck retraction exercise. While lying in bed with your head flat against the mattress, give yourself the biggest double chin you can. Repeat 10 times.
For Jackass: stop hiking your shoulders up to your ears. This is pretty much a stress thing, it’s human instinct to protect our neck when we’re under stress so that predators can’t get at it. Easiest way to do that is be elevating the shoulders, so. Periodically take not of where your shoulders are at.
Absolute Fuckwaffle: stretch out your chest. The rhomboids on the back work to keep our shoulder blades back, so when we’re hunched forward they are constantly straining to do their job. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as telling you to stand up straight, since our pectorals get chronically tight and prevent us from doing so. Step one: pectoral stretches. Hold for at least 20 seconds.
Asshole: Superman exercises. Like the rhomboids, the ESGs are straining against the slump. Stretching the chest will help them, too, but then you e got to strengthen your back. Do 20 of those per day.
traitor tried to murder me last night and fuckwaffle is always up on my shit
