#BRAIN IS FULL OF A LOT I AM TIRED

[nukenai]

My job is a little boring and they could pay me more I guess, and we've been insanely slammed with work since like, last July, and it hasn't let up at all.

But idk. I've been there for I think 6 years now. And I just think about things like how the manager of our department keeps making sure we know she's paying attention to how hard we're working. And has told us a million times not to break ourselves with getting more work done than usual, and to just do what we can every day, because "we know you are not robots and I will not entertain any expectation that implies otherwise" (cool actual quote)

And then I think about how the morning Oma died, I texted my supervisor, and she replied in regards to bereavement stuff, "I will handle everything, please don't worry about it". And then a few days later I received a care package from upper management with a personalized card expressing condolences for the loss of my grandmother, along with a candle, some hand lotions, and a stuffed dog. Apparently this was because my supervisor told upper management about it, and they decided to do that.

I hear so many horror stories of jobs that are awful about shit like that. And it's like, I tell my supervisor "I have to leave early today because xyz thing with animal" and she'll be like "hope everything's alright, just let me know whenever you're back!" with no further questions. Could I find a job that pays more? Probably. But would it be a job where I can work from home with my animals all day, and I really feel treated like and appreciated as a human being that means something? Probably not.

In one meeting when I expressed slight frustration over being called into a meeting because my production metric slipped, my supervisor immediately went off on a tirade about how much she appreciates me, how good of an employee I am, how I always show up and never call out and I'm extremely reliable and good at my job, and how she loves seeing pictures of Sammie in the Teams chat and I'm a joy to the team...

And I was like damn Amy I'm not quitting I was slightly annoyed LOL. But it was nice to hear, yknow?

Sorry I just saw an awful instagram reel where a woman's boss was terrible to her after her mother in law died and it hit me hard. I'm forever sending everyone I love (that's you if you're reading this) the best vibes ever and I hope you can find a job where you get stability and feel appreciated. Even if it's a little frustrating sometimes.

oh also they let me switch to a 4 day work week so I have an entire day off on Wednesday and also we have like infinite overtime available and I'm not doing anything else but making tons of extra money! lmao (the overtime is not remotely pushed. it's just like. hey who wants it. and like, i'm gonna sit on my ass at a computer anyways!)

[piplupod]

mother: "theres this great job where you'd be on-call to come in!"

me: "ahhh i don't really want to be on-call, that would stress me out a lot because I'd always be on edge,,"

mother: "no you wouldn't, you could make it your thing!"

me: "...my thing?"

mother: "being on call! it'd be great! :)"

me: "i would probably be crying like... a lot ahaha. because I would always be on edge never knowing when to expect having to go into work, yknow?"

mother: "nooo, you could just make it a thing!"

me: "sorry, what do you mean by thing?"

AND I NEVER FOUND OUT !!

[sysig]

It always seems like such a good idea in the moment (Patreon)

The first four are in reference to a great idea I had of - since I’ve finished my lower-limit page number testing for making books; shorter fics take up less page space, and just increasing the font size isn’t as handsome! - simply making a mini book! All it would take would be to halve the pages again, right? Just cut them right down the middle! Easy peasy!

As I’m sure you can tell by the second, no. Not easy peasy. Difficult painful un-fun >:(

Obviously I still did it tho! What do you take me for, someone who could have the idea of an even tinier book and then not do something about it?? No It’s also the only one so far to have a paper bookmark rather than a ribbon!

All told it’s a bit smaller than your average manga (I love the monochrome covers on these under their dust jackets haha <3) - you can see even with effectively doubling up the pages by halving their size, it was still very small-spined!

A quick shot while it was still being made hehe ♪ It’s Out! Paired here - and the earlier one, just without its dust jacket haha - with my Zarla SC2 collection (ft. Family, Negotiations are Going...Well, and With No Obligation) - I absolutely kicked myself after the fact for not including Out as the run-up to everything, I was really trying to make a full collection in probably-chronological order! Out would’ve been a perfect start! And it only would’ve taken like four pages!!

Ah well, it was still quite a learning experience - I probably wouldn’t make another standalone of under 4k-ish just for formatting reasons but I did get some good ideas of how to do so if I wanted to! Although, my next project is going to be even more of a formatting nightmare........I’ll get there when I get there! Lol

[daily-whistlepaw]

Partial hiatus announcement

I have a very painful week of exams coming up. Technically I've been at it for a few weeks now and I've still managed to draw all the whistlepaws, but this week I have three exams with barely any time between them and they scare me, and then also one extra on the Monday thereafter, stealing a whole extra weekend from me. It'll be a heavy week for me and I might struggle to even justify drawing the whistlepaws. (It's not like I am studying at all honestly, but my brain hates me sometimes and I'm still trying to memorize those dumb Greek models)

So in short, expect this week's daily Whistlepaws, until at least the start of July honestly, to be more hastily drawn or just missing.

I will catch up in the summer, but this week will drain the little energy I have left and while I'd want to just spend it on drawing Whis, but I don't feel like I am allowed to anymore. I need to study for these things

[tamagotchikgs]

i am still so weak dude even just using the trackpad on my laptop for a minute or maybe even less to scroll on tumblr was enough to make my arm tingly nd numb

[bistaxx]

Honestly, knowing this event is (presumably) ending on my birthday is already the best gift I could ever get

[hellfireeddiemunson]

i have bad melted soup brain today and i hate it

[cutearose]

okay but how do you ask for help when your childhood makes you feel guilty for needing help and the help that you need feels rude to ask for

[flutterby5]

.

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[musical-chick-13]

...That...sure was a reveal wasn’t it.

[earlgreytea68]

Okay. It's time for an AI rant.

My nephew is 13 years old. Whenever he writes a paper for school, I check it over and fix all of his mistakes for him. He said to me, "Maybe I'll proofread your paper for you in exchange," meaning one of the scholarly articles I write for work. I said, "Cool," and gave him the file. And he said, "Well, this is full of errors! See, you always say you have a lot to correct on my stuff, and look at all the stuff you got wrong!" And I said, surprised, "What? Where?" Because I'm sure there are typos in the draft I sent him, but not, like, that many.

And then he pointed to the screen and said, "Look at all the blue and red lines you have."

And I said, "Yeah, but those are wrong. Like, those are blue and red lines I'm ignoring because the computer is wrong." And then I paused and added, "You know you can't proofread a paper by just looking at the red and blue lines, right?" And he gave me the blankest look, because that clearly is EXACTLY what he thinks. And it became even clearer suddenly why, whenever I correct something on his paper, his immediate reaction is, "It didn't have a blue or red line."

There's a very good reason for that: THAT'S BECAUSE THE COMPUTER ISN'T SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW THAT IT WAS WRONG.

I am so tired of being sold the idea that computers are better than humans and so we should just outsource everything to them, which is clearly the lesson my nephew is absorbing in U.S. middle school. COMPUTERS ARE NOT BETTER THAN HUMANS. Like, maybe they are better at humans at crawling through rubble to find people trapped inside. They are also better at preserving things in a searchable format. Things like that. Very limited circumstances.

I don't want to sound alarmist but everything I hear about people using generative AI freaks me out. It's not just that I'm freaked out by people being like, "I use it to write novels!" (Although I don't see how they do, I have tried to have it write fiction for me and the output was truly terrible.) But I recognize my bias around creative writing and so no one needs to credit my views on artificial writing. But! Other things are alarming, too! "I use it to brainstorm x, y, or z." But...why? Why not just...use your own brain...to...brain...storm? The computer doesn't even have a brain to brainstorm with! And you might be like, "But it comes up with things that my brain would never think of!" So would other people! You could also brainstorm with other people! Or even through Google to see what other people have thought before you (not AI). Please don't belittle the wonder of thinking.

I just feel like the marketing around generative AI boils down to "Wouldn't it be easier not to use your own brain to think about things?" Everyone. No. It would not be. Please just trust me on this. I'm not just an old person who is out of touch with technology or something. I promise. USE YOUR BRAINS. IT WILL BE OKAY.

[cheswirls]

hhhhh i wanna finish sickfic soon but idk if it's productive to work on that tonight

[renniferno]

i am not my body

being this weird. meeting of so many disabilities and being queer on top of it has done some really fucky things to my identity and concept of self.

My thoughts on what makes someone who they are as an identity is that it's all choice. You are who you CHOOSE to be. You decide if you like or dislike something, from things as simple to taste in music, all the way up to where you stand on global current events. (I'm not getting into any of that right now, that is not the point of this post.)

Like, who I am in as much as who I have decided to be is someone that tries really hard to make a positive impact on the lives around me. I try to compliment people if I see something worth complimenting, like an outfit or makeup or how they've done their hair. I try to smile when I accidentally meet eyes with a stranger. I try, very hard actually, to be a force of what I perceive as 'good' in the world.

Take that, and wrap it up in also all the choices that make up taking care of myself. I want to be able to have a positive impact on the lives around me, and to do that, I have to be a minimal type of functional. I need to eat or my body breaks down. I need a social life or my mind breaks down, etc etc.

But then you throw in these things that people see as me but are not choices: I did not choose to have adhd. I did not choose depression, or anxiety, or ptsd or the events that lead to it, I did not choose to have a body so full of errors in the code that it is literally falling apart.

So I have this disconnect from who I am and what my body is like. My body isn't me because my body wasn't my choice. There are things I can do to change parts of it, but I can't fix that I have a genetic disorder that said 'hey fuck your connective tissues.' or that my body will attack my intestines if I eat gluten.

I accept that my body is mine, in as much as it is the only way I have to interact with the universe, but it isn't me. I use it to move around, I use it to converse and create, but it's a tool. People see it and assume they see me, but I really don't feel like they do.

I look at my body and see something to hate, something that hurts and moves incorrectly sometimes and does things it shouldn't. I see an identity that people have assigned to me, but not myself.

I feel like other people look at my body and see things that they assume is me. They don't feel the way it malfunctions, they don't know that I can feel my knees grinding together with every step, they aren't in my head when the brain fog kicks in.

It's infuriating because they're using the same senses as me to determine the correct and polite ways to address me, but it really does feel like they're talking to the body, and not me. They see the body as part of who I am, and that's not their fault.

But I am not my body. I'm just the pilot. I don't understand what makes people feel like a gender, fuck, I don't even understand what gender is. I know it's an important part of identity and that people feel very strongly about it, but I have no real way to work the idea in my head. Gender feels like such a body thing.

It feels easier to think of it as a meat mech I have to keep functional as my only point of interacting with the universe at large, something that enables me to take in information.

I didn't really have anywhere I was going with this other than 'im agender because i identify as literally anything other than the meat of my physical form, because i am the choices i've made and the actions I commit myself to and not the broken down form that is my only way to interact with the world' in this weird overlap between disabilities and queer-ness.

and it can't even eat normal bread. like. c'mon. you're going to make me deal with all that AND take away sourdough english muffins? what the fuck.

[prans-micellar-water]

to knowis to be loved and to be known is to b eloved. I want transgender friends who will know me and love me in a way that cis people usually do not

[autistic-shaiapouf]

Covid update, the vice grip pressure headache is gone, I was able to get out of bed without issues today, I actually slept through the night, AND don't feel feverish anymore 😤