piplup99

[piplup99]

Someone at an old job asked why I wanted to write up the meeting minutes for our team and I said 'i wanna control the narrative' and they were like 'what' and I pointed out that no one was gonna remember what we said in six months and so my interpretation of the meeting would dictate the assumed reality of what happened

"none of you ever send corrections when I offer the draft so y'all have consented to my version"

"we don't read that shit"

"you must trust me implicitly to create our shared reality that's so sweet"

That's how several coworkers decided I was a supervillain and how I learned several coworkers didn't understand record keeping as like a CONCEPT

[piplup99]

Ok but isn't a rent-a-cop just a henchman for a mall? Maybe the mall will just ask you to beat up batman and steal a truck. Employers ask some batshit things nowadays.

IMO the difference between a good henchman and a good rent-a-cop is that, when the big guy asks you to do something illegal, Henchman says “you got it, boss” and rent-a-cop says “no can do, boss” so really a rent-a-cop is just a street legal henchman

[piplup99]

when people are like “he’s not even attractive you could find a guy that looks like him at any gas station” i’m like….. well you see there’s beauty everywhere actually

[piplup99]

Lots of ominous news nowadays, but there are good things too! Thailand's Marriage Equality Law took effect today!

This tweet takes you to the top of a thread that lists all the changes, like replacing gendered terms like husband and wife with spouses, same-sex marriages have full legal status, same-sex couples can adopt and use IVF and create pre-nups, just a whole lot of steps to make them equal.

It's all just so amazing and joyous. They hosted a parade for the newlywed couples!

[piplup99]

I can’t believe they’re making me do my degree I signed up for

[piplup99]

I can't lie, I find it very odd that posts cautioning people against donating to individual* campaigns and promoting the idea of supporting mutual aid efforts and community kitchens in Gaza can rack up 10k+ notes--while a post promoting a community kitchen (that I can personally vouch for) struggles to get 1k notes, and has barely pulled in a couple hundred dollars over the past week.

I actively try to avoid using guilting tactics in fundraising, but this is weird to me. It's like people are using these posts as an excuse not to do things they already didn't want to do anyway, rather than actually taking their recommendations on board...

*In my experience, these campaigns often support large extended families + their neighbours

MAQMAP is a community kitchen aiming to support families in the Mawasi Al-Qarara area.

[piplup99]

i love how everyone on this website interacts with each other in ways that are so socially impermissible irl. how did we get here

[piplup99]

This is an imperfect "experiment" over a complex subject, but it's a thing I like to do to visualize the sheer gap between the dollar and the brazilian real, which is checking "how many federal minimum wage hours would take to buy a thing". It goes like this:

Under the US federal minimum wage of USD 7.25 per hour, a copy of Sid Meier's Civilization VI on Steam (priced at USD 59.99) would come around at 8.2 hours.

That same game is sold on Brazil at BRL 129.00. At the current federal minimum wage of BRL 6.90 per hour, that comes around at 18.6 hours.

That is, however, after the publisher has already applied Steam's dynamic pricing to lower the cost of the game for our region. At its full dollar price, the game would cost around BRL 350, being generous with the conversion rate. How many federal minimum wage hours do you think that is?

[piplup99]

This dumbass just made everyone female

[piplup99]

You can tell a lot about the health of a civilization by their warning signs. Places with a lot of dumb folks will have very broad, very dumb warnings in public. "No feeding the birds." "Stop swimming in this drainage pond." That kind of thing.

Advanced civilizations have very precise signs. They've covered the bases of their regular, run-of-the-mill idiots, and now they're working hard to cover that other end of the bell curve: the talented idiot. When I was in Germany last time, there was a big warning sign that consisted of a 76-letter-long word that means "stop bothering this particular goose, Sven." I don't know who Sven was, but the goose looked pretty calm. It worked.

Now, I have a secret to tell you. You can just make your own signs. There's no law against it, except perhaps "littering," and the municipal sign factory doesn't have very good security. If you show up there past close and put in the door code that you shoulder-surfed off one of the employees returning from lunch a week prior, you have all night to fuck around with their sign-printing machine, making the most official-looking placards you can think of.

Is this wrong? I don't think so. It's a public space, and being able to put up an aluminum sign that says wacky crank shit is your right. For instance, just last week, I banned pickup trucks from parking by the playground. The cops figured out something was going on, because they didn't get any calls for toddlers getting backed over for a couple of days and sent a patrol truck to investigate. Took my sign right down.

What I discovered after that is that nobody keeps records of what signs are supposed to be there. Why would anyone put up a sign for no reason? They cost money, after all. The city is now suing the shit out of that officer for stealing the "no trucks" sign, thanks to an anonymous tipster who called in the theft. Guy wearing a reflective vest came by and put like four more of them up after the lawsuit made the news, just out of spite. I'm not entirely sure if he's actually a city worker; we ran into each other at 3am at the sign factory and just grunted. He was working on some really crazy signs about not feeding a particular swan. Probably German.

[piplup99]

nuclear power is impressive until you get up to why. "we use the most precisely engineered machinery ever created to split atoms to release energy" oh yeah how come? "boil water to turn a fan" get the fuck out

[piplup99]

ever since i learned about ghost buildings i haven't been able to stop thinking about them

[piplup99]

alright, I’m annoyed with the class that I’m taking. it’s about writing novels, and I thought it would have cool stuff about balancing your narrative and developing themes etc, but instead she spent the first class talking about how every book fits into the Hero’s Journey (the monomyth template). and I was somewhat of a contrarian, and said “can you give us examples of books that don’t fit into this template?” and she said “no. because all books fit.”

but I dunno man, I just finished reading this Korean book where the plot is just the character having a string of hookups and reflecting on them without changing in any way. I don’t know if it’s possible to contort that into the Hero’s Journey.

[piplup99]

Hey friendly reminder to love and cherish Green Day

[piplup99]

i watched the livestream of trump signing executive orders and answering questions from the press. here are some of the big ones + other things mentioned today:

trump declared a national emergency at the southern border + is getting the US military more involved in stopping "invasions including mass migration"

no one can declare asylum in the US

all existing appointments for people wanting to legally become US citizens are canceled

birthright citizenship (aka the 14th amendment) is now gone

ICE sweeps beginning "soon," not specifying when (though there are rumors it's starting tomorrow in sanctuary cities such as chicago)

mexican cartels are now designated "foreign terrorist organizations" and trump is not opposed to US troops entering mexico to eliminate them

he restored the death penalty for "crimes committed by illegal aliens"

biden had signed an executive order attempting to stop cops from using chokeholds or doing no-knock warrants. trump just revoked that order

25% tariffs on canada and mexico begin on feb 1 2025 — expect a lot of produce imported from mexico to get more expensive soon

tariffs on china will begin soon, not specified when

trump said he intends to take back the panama canal, did not specify when or how

january 6 insurrectionists are to be immediately released/pardoned

he pardoned the leader of the proud boys

tiktok has a 90 day extension, during which the US gov will try to buy 50% of tiktok. trump said he no longer cares that china is "spying on our young people," but he wants to buy half of tiktok so the US government "can police it a little bit, or a lot." if tiktok will not sell, it will be banned in the US again.

he claims the people of greenland want to become part of the US

he says the gulf of mexico is now to be called the "gulf of america" + denali is now to be called "mount mckinley"

alaska is to be mined and become the US' main source for fossil fuels

the green new deal and "electric vehicle" (green energy) mandates are over

the US has withdrawn from the paris climate agreement

the US has withdrawn from the world health organization

reproductiverights.gov is already gone

the US now "only recognizes two genders, male and female"

trans women prisoners are to be housed in male prisons; gender affirming care for prisoners is gone

self-identification for gender on passports, government IDs, and social security cards is gone

all federal employees are required to work in the office five days a week, no more working from home

trump said the US is going to "pursue our manifest destiny into the stars" and plant a US flag on mars

sources on what executive orders were signed: one two three

and lastly, some things that happened during the inauguration:

the pastor who blessed the inauguration during the swearing in ceremony has already announced a new meme coin/cryptocurrency

trump did not put his hand on the bible + there are rumors the pope is going to say trump is the antichrist

the wealthiest people on the planet — the CEOs of twitter/tesla, amazon, google, meta, and even the CEO of tiktok — who own almost all communication platforms used by westerners — stood directly behind trump as he was sworn in

elon musk, the wealthiest person alive, who has been given his own vaguely-defined US government agency, did a nazi salute on stage at the presidential podium. neo-nazis are already celebrating

[piplup99]

Updates about the TikTok ban/relight … a lot of people thought that TikTokers were being dramatic. We were forced to say “unalive” “pew-pew” and “grape”… now it’s a community violation to say that Meta sucks.

[piplup99]

"Nowhere is the power of capital, the power of a handful of billionaires over the whole of society, so crude and as openly corrupt as in America. Once capital exists, it dominates the whole of society, & no...form of franchise (voting) can alter the essence of the matter.”

— V.I. Lenin (1919)