#I’ve never had an issue with US postal service

[renee-mariposa]

In light of the fact that FedEx is now mis-delivering 50% of my packages (!!!) I wish companies shipping within the continental US were forced to give buyers the option of shipping with USPS. Like, you can offer FedEx or UPS or whoever you have a contract with but you must also allow the choice to ship with USPS instead.

[justforbooks]

The career of the actor Andre Braugher, who has died of lung cancer aged 61, was benchmarked by two performances in police dramas a generation apart. In the groundbreaking drama Homicide: Life on the Street, from 1993 until 1999, he played Detective Frank Pembleton, whose drive immediately made him the anchor of an impressive ensemble cast led by Yaphet Kotto and Ned Beatty. He drew a younger audience with the comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013-21) as Captain Ray Holt, who takes over a chaotic homicide squad and whose intensity again makes him the heart of the show.

Braugher’s deep, resonant voice and seemingly effortless control drew the respect of all he worked with. David Simon, creator of Homicide and The Wire, said: “I’ve worked with a lot of wonderful actors. I’ll never work with one better.” His classical training, at the Juilliard School in New York, made him a regular at the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park, and indeed his portrayal of Henry V in 1996 won him an Obie (the off-Broadway equivalent of the Tony awards).

He brought the projection of the stage to the small screen. Pembleton was the master of “the Box”, or the interrogation room. He explained to his rookie partner in Homicide (played by Kyle Secor), it was “salesmanship … as silver tongued and thieving as ever moved used cars, Florida swamp land or Bibles. But what I am selling is a long prison sentence.” He dominated those small scenes, but the episode Subway, with Vincent D’Onofrio as a character pushed between subway trains, who will die once the trains are separated, was a two-hander whose intensity might have come from the stage of Beckett, Pinter or Mamet.

In Brooklyn Nine-Nine, as Holt, he played it straight in two senses. The adage of comedy being funniest when played straight gained resonance from Braugher’s ability to show the audience with a gesture or line-reading that he, like you, got the joke. But Holt is also gay. His gayness is never an issue, except as motivation for his progress within the police. It was as if Pembleton were stepping into Kotto’s “Gee” Giardello, a black man with an Italian father who was determined to rise in a white-dominated department.

This drive reflected Braugher’s own background. In the tough neighbourhood of Austin, on Chicago’s West Side, both his parents worked for the government; his father, Floyd, was a heavy equipment operator for the state of Illinois, and his mother, Sally, worked for the US Postal Service. He recalled he might have “pretended I was hard and tough and not square”, but he won scholarships to the Jesuit St Ignatius College prep and then to study mathematics at Stanford University, California. After walking into a student production of Hamlet, and playing Claudius, he decided he wanted to act.

Another scholarship took him to Juilliard. He graduated in 1988 and almost immediately was cast in a TV revival of Kojak, as his assistant. His first film role came in Glory (1989); he was so impressive as the educated Thomas Searles, forced to serve as a private soldier in the all-black regiment commanded by his white friend, that Hollywood came calling, but the parts were standard stereotyical roles. His father had questioned how a black actor would make a living, and Braugher later explained: “I’d rather not work than do a part I’m ashamed of.”

He played the lead in a TV movie, The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson (1990), playing Robinson, the first African-American player in major league baseball, who earlier in the 1940s, as a US army lieutenant, had refused to ride in the back of a segregated bus; and appeared in another TV film, The Tuskegee Airmen (1995). He was an egotistical actor in Spike Lee’s Get On the Bus (1996), about the Million Man March on Washington DC the year before. In 1998 he won his first Emmy award for playing Pembleton; he was nominated 11 times, and won his second in 2006 for his role in the miniseries Thief.

After Homicide, he starred as a doctor in Gideon’s Crossing (2000-01), as a cop in Hack (2002-04), as a car dealer in the comedy-drama Men of a Certain Age (2009-11) and as the captain of a submarine which goes on the run after he refuses to obey orders to fire nuclear missiles in Last Resort (2012-13). He had another series of remarkable two-handers in a recurring role as Hugh Laurie’s psychiatrist in House, was a defense attorney in episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and voiced Governor Woodchuck Coodchuck-Berkowitz in the animated comedy BoJack Horseman.

He made the most of supporting roles in films such as Primal Fear (as Richard Gere’s investigator), Poseidon (captain of the sinking liner), Salt (as the US secretary of defense) and most notably as a New York Times editor in She Said (2022), covering the Harvey Weinstein scandal. He also starred in 10,000 Black Men Named George (2002), the story of the unionisation of Pullman railway porters, who were always called “George” by passengers.

Braugher admitted that his career “could have been larger, but it would have been at the expense of my own life”. He lived in suburban New Jersey with his wife, the actor Ami Brabson (who played Pembleton’s wife in Homicide). He said he wanted his three sons, Michael, Isaiah and John Wesley, raised in a “true context”, away from being a movie star’s offspring in Hollywood.

He is survived by his wife and sons, his brother, Charles, and his mother.

🔔 Andre Keith Braugher, actor, born 1 July 1962; died 11 December 2023

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[ghoulfr13nd]

hi!! music anon 🎶 here! i wanted to start by wishing you happy 4/13!! :D in the spirit of homestuck day i have a very specific question! have you ever tried making hs aspect playlists? i used to make and listen to them regularly i had an obsession so i'm curious xd

and i suspect ud be back from the Crane Wives' concert by the time I send this ask so I hope it went well! :D (also I'm soo jelous of seeing Barnes Courtney live ;v; or in general the capability to go to concerts without system overload because as much as I like to dream about going to concerts I know with my sensory issues I wouldn't be able to survive for long without overstimulation and cutting it short 😔)

I totally get metal being overstimulating! even though I love it I still need to be in a right headspace and environment to listen to some of it! and you know, I think Worthikids could be in metal category but not all of his songs? he likes to mix genres soo maybe alternative music in general but yeah, i think kinda! (btw my all time favorite band is Rammstein (i've been listening to them since middle school!) I also really like Equilibrium (its folk metal!))

(oh yeah i decided to divide the part with me trying to read your ocs based on their playlists into different ask because it's pretty long and maybe this way it'd be easier to manage? i hope! 😭)

music anon my dearest i’m so damn sorry. i’m so sorry. i care you. you are my friend now. i so look forward to your asks.

happy belated 4/13 🥺 it is probably my favorite holiday (or would be if i i had any good traditions:( ) but to answer your question — I HAVE NOT CONSIDERED MAKING ASPECT PLAYLISTS. THATS SUCH A FUCKING HUGE BIG BRAINED IDEA. I WANT TO DO THAT SO BAD. i was OBSESSED with classpects back in the day so i think it would be fun to dig into that and really make playlists for different hero titles….

the crane wives concert was alright!!! the band was GREAT and i got a STELLAR tshirt but the traffic director in the parking lot convinced me to try a parking space i’d never have tried for in a million years and i scraped up the side of my car IN FRONT OF OTHER PEOPLE IT WAS SO EMBARRASSING!!! and it was all i could think about the whole time 😔 it is what it is

I’ve since gone to see Death Cab For Cutie/The Postal Service and Peter Bradley Adams!!!! I’ve been very excited to tell you about my other concerts. I really really enjoy going. have you ever considered wearing earplugs to concerts? I’ve heard that helps with some of the. yknow. how much everything is. if that makes sense. maybe that could be helpful to both of us!

do you have any specific songs you recommend from those bands? i want to give them a listen but i want to know what your favorites are!

(i also totally agree with your thoughts on worthikids but i dont have much else to say about it gjskdjdj)

i’m going to read your opinions of my ocs now (IVE BEEN REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO THIS!!!)

[astramthetaprime]

Plans and Progress

Okay, so I quit my job Friday at the end of my shift.  Without another job to go to.�� Because it apparently gets easier to do once you’ve done it before.  /shrug

However!  I am not without plans, and progress is being made in other areas of life.  First, the plans.

I am taking this weekend to be a weekend.  Because weekend.  And I just quit my job.  So weekend.  

Starting Tomorrow, 1/23/2023 

I will sign up to be an Instacart in-store shopper. Grocery stores sometimes do hit one of my few sensory problems, but it’s nothing I can’t handle.  It’s like my targetting system goes crazy, I try to focus on everything at once.  Annoying, but not a desperate issue unless I’m very tired. 

I will also sign up to Rover to do dogwalking and petsitting.  Because I’m actually good with animals.  Animals are usually much more sensible and far less annoying than people.  

I am also considering signing up on Fiverr as I had an idea a while back to do small mailings.  If there’s one thing I still know it’s the postal service.  I actually came up with a pricing scheme for doing small-run (200 or less) mailings of 4 pages or less.  That’s generally how many pages you can stuff in a standard business envelope and send with a 1st Class stamp without going over the 1 ounce limit.  I can think of all kinds of uses for this, I could print, address, return address, stamp and send mailings easily.  It’s a skill I know.  Play to your strengths, work on your weaknesses, right?  

I will also re-do my resume as it’s a mess.  I’ll be putting in more applications to actual jobs but honestly if I can make enough in the gig economy it will lose importance.  I’d far rather work on my own at stuff I know and am good at than try to learn a new job at this point.  But I will re-do the resume.  

Outside of work-related, I continue to work on Pathfinder . 

Also there’s that bit of fanfic from the last post.  Because I got caught up over a good looking older guy with black hair.  Because I’m stupid for black hair.  

Good lord why did it have to be Tom Cruise?  The poster boy for L. Ron Hubbard’s ego trip?

My Buddhist intellectual heart just cracked a little.  Somewhere in my brain, a brain cell just sacrificed itself for the greater good of humanity.  I believe in data and robot spacecraft and verifiable, reproducible science as the basis for science-fiction.  As Asimov and Clarke intended!  

Okay, enough of the caterwauling, back to the post.  

Progress!  Has been Made!

This past week I was checking some prices of things on Amazon, y’know, as you do.  And I found a queen-size weighted blanket at half-price. Like, an insane price.  $23.  Not joking, it was $23 dollars.  So as it was a reasonable price and I’ve been curious I said what the heck and ordered one.  It came in this past Friday and for the past 2 nights I’ve been sleeping with it.  I’ll admit I was skeptical since I largely don’t have sensory issues except the aforementioned problems at grocery stores.  But I’m here to tell you, that thing works.  It’s like sleeping wrapped up in an octopus filled with lead shot, but I wake up in the morning and my back is not hurting, there are no hot flashes or nausea, and damn if I don’t sleep through the entire night!  I’ve had 8+ hours of solid sleep for the last 2 nights and I’m not being forced awake by my back hurting.  It’s freaking amazing.  So yeah, you guys weren’t kidding, I’d never have believed it if I wasn’t sleeping in it.  Yay Skillful Means!

I have been thinking on ways to get my original fiction out there in the world.  I am aware that part of the problem is exposure.  My first thought is audiobook versions.  I used to do a podcast many moons ago, it’s no longer online so please don’t look for it, but I narrated all my original fiction extant at that time.  And while of course I know my own work better than anybody, I am not a voice actor.  I have a thick Southern accent, an inescapable Tennessee Hillbilly accent, that simply does not lend itself to quality narration.  Also, possibly due to my autism I stutter and even to myself my speaking voice is just wrong.  I think it’s called “prosody”?  My voice is often monotone, the rhythm is often off, and thanks to the ravages of early menopause my voice dropped about 3/4ths of an octave several years ago.  So yeah, doing my own stories just would not be a sound business decision at this point.  But Audible does have this thing called ACX where authors can connect with voice actors to produce audiobooks of their work.  It’s something to think about, and certainly I’m well aware of the popularity of audiobooks.  I’ve listened to enough of them myself, that’s for sure.

The key point in all this -- I’m coming up with options rather than sinking into the abyss.  I am betting on myself, on my skills and abilities, rather than trying to shoehorn myself into the standard model of societal physics.  There are other ways to make a living where I can run my own life and not be forced into the boxes of what’s always been done.  I can make my own hours, find my own work that fits my abilities and limitations, and freaking be myself.  

Right, so.  I’m going to go watch my view count on AO3.  And try not to think about the Stupid Black Hair thing.  

[leifedling]

Newbie question here: where you buy the discs? I would like to purchase a complete discography. C'mass webshop link are not of much help.

Candlemass love to make our lives miserable, so... there's not an official internet shop that offers everything in the catalog. At this point, that would be impossible (due to discontinued versions).

Do you want some epic doom metal? then, you have to suffer ~

Here are some tips (I wish I had the money to be a serious collector 😭)

Discogs is awesome, you can search for a certain item filtering by release, version, condition, etc. but some prices can be high. It’s the most useful site if you want some rares or limited editions or are looking for a certain pressing.

Ebay is really helpful, but try to do a worldwide search. Many of the best items are located in Europe, so if you're outside Europe, be ready to pay for painful shipping rates especially if you want vinyl records

Check some related labels' stores as they stock re-issues or latests albums. I mean: Nuclear Blast, Season of Mist, Burning Shed, Peaceville etc.

If you want first-pressings or really old items, you have to spend a lot more than you would like to. All my first pressings were bought in a local market when they were cheaper or I stole them from my family's collection.

There are a lot of re-issues and nice editions of the classic albums so you'll definitely find something you like at a good price.

Some versions of "non-classics" (Idk how to name them) are too expensive as they don't have re-issues. Death Magic Doom is an example, the vinyl record was never re-issued and it's selling for a similar price of an Epicus first press 🥺️ so if you aren’t desperate, skip them or wait for a re-issue.

If you're looking for limited boxsets like Doomology, you will need a few extra money and a bit of luck to find them (especially at a good price). These box sets can be really heavy and need to be well protected to be shipped overseas.

Behind the Wall of Doom is more affordable but it's still a vinyl sized heavy book, so the shipping can be horrible. I paid like 35 usd to get mine shipped from UK throught the cheapest postal method because I'm poor and I had hopes to avoid customs ~

Don’t limit your search to your country or near countries. I’ve had items shipped from Sweden, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Greece, UK and Japan. If the seller doesn’t ship to your location and you can’t find the item in other website, then using mail forwarding services is the option.

If you’re starting, browse Discogs and read about every version and make a kind of list (or wishlist) with what you want, save it as “watched/in wantlist” there and on Ebay to get alerts and compare prices.

If I think of something else, I’ll update this 🖤

[sonicenvy]

placed an order with the project N95 site for new face masks ELEVEN days ago, and the order arrived in my city SIX days ago, but never made it to my address. I’m actually kinda pissed because, like ????. I paid $50 for this, and I still haven’t gotten my shit yet. It would be one thing if they never shipped it (fair) or if it was still in transit (fair), but the tracking number says that it made it to my city and then was “FORWARDED” to an undisclosed location, which was SIX days ago. The postal service site claims that there was an issue with my address, but the address that I provided to the project N95 people and that they confirmed in my order confirmation email is correct, and we have no forwarding instructions at our address. Clearly, this f**k up is on these people that I ordered from, as they must have printed an incorrect address on the shipping label or something because I can’t think of anything i did wrong. Anyways I filled out a contact us on their site. I wish they had a phone line though so I could get this resolved sooner, because I would like my N95 masks so I can wear them to work, where i work in person, with MANY unmasked, unvaxxed children under 5. At my job, in person, where many of my coworkers are now coming down with covid or the flu. I’ve been exposed twice in the last 3 weeks to covid+ colleagues and I had the flu for SIX days. literally hate it here.

tldr; where the f**k is my package??? I don’t mind slow delivery but this is ridiculous.

[copperbadge]

Do you have any thoughts about the announced adaptation of 'the City Watch' books by BBC America? Opinions seem pretty mixed in the fandom and I'd love to hear your take?

For a show I was almost definitely never going to watch from the outset, I have more thoughts about the Watch adaptation than I really know what to do with, to be honest. It’s actually hard to assemble them coherently. 

There are basically three strands of opinion I have about watching The Watch: personal, critical, and literary. 

The personal: 

I don’t have a great history of enjoying media adaptations of Terry Pratchett’s work. One reason I didn’t watch Good Omens until a month or two after its release is that I knew this about myself and I didn’t want to turn it on, get disappointed, and turn it off, as I’d done with The Hogfather (we need not speak of The Animated Soul Music, lord). Granted, the Death books are not my favorites, so I was never going to deeply engage with The Hogfather, and then they came out with The Colour Of Magic, another non-favorite, so I skipped it, and so I was super disengaged by the time Going Postal came out (though I should really give Going Postal a chance because I do love Going Postal as a book). So I acknowledge this isn’t objective, this is personal, but it’s still a factor.  

So I’m not coming into this whole situation with The Watch as someone who actually wants, or enjoys, TV adaptations of Pterry’s books, Good Omens notwithstanding – and let’s be real, Good Omens is an outlier. It was a collaboration, one of the original authors had deep control over the adaptation, and also Good Omens isn’t a Discworld book. It’s much more thoroughly rooted in our known reality, which makes it easier to convey to television. But my ultimate point is that when I hear about a Discworld book being adapted to TV, I shrug and move on. I have the books. I don’t need the shows. 

The critical: 

I think it is a bad habit of fandom that we extrapolate a lot of inference from a relatively small amount of data – we tend to take a couple of photos, a press release, some casting information, and very quickly make a large set of assumptions. It’s not necessarily that these assumptions are wrong, but we jump to a lot of conclusions. I’m thinking of early backlash over Good Omens, which I don’t even remember what it was about but I remember Gaiman having to get pretty stern about “could you wait until at least the trailer is out before jumping down my throat”. I’m also thinking of the casting of David Thewlis as Remus Lupin, which was not well-received until we saw more than blurry set photos. 

Now, all that having been said, some of the casting news has been…difficult. On the one hand, a Black Sybil Ramkin? Sign me the fuck up. On the other, I know that for a lot of people, having a Sybil who is both large and older is really important (I think it’s important too). Especially if Vimes is older, it’s creepy and backwards to have Sybil be young and hollywood-idea-of-pretty (even if the time travel element is involved, it gets into a weird area). Also, I’m really over only ever casting people of color as villains or supporting-role-women. Vimes canonically comes from a “poor but respectable” neighborhood that could easily be reframed as an ethnic neighborhood, which would be especially pointed and interesting given his family’s long connection to the history of the city. An Indian or part-Indian Sam Vimes would be really, really interesting and cool, for example. 

There’s also a lot of discussion about casting a nonbinary person as Cheery and explicitly setting Cheery up as nonbinary, as opposed to explicitly a trans woman*, especially since in the books she identifies as a woman, not as nonbinary. But I’m not entirely sure if Cheery as nonbinary is actually going to be canon or if that’s just the reporting on the show not knowing how to handle the whole Female Dwarf situation. Not everyone interprets Cheery as trans at all, either, because of how dwarf gender identity works, which complicates matters somewhat, so I’m not going to wade too far into these waters. I do think it’s great enby actors are getting work in enby roles, but there’s some issues there that need further examination. 

(* Note -- corrected the above after it was pointed out to me that NB are not trans light; I’ve changed it to trans woman rather than trans-as-umbrella-term, more here.)

So I think overall it’s early days to make a lot of calls about what The Watch will and won’t be, but I also think there’s a lot of reason to be concerned and annoyed, and that brings us to the real, hardcore reason that I saw the first reporting on The Watch and immediately noped out: 

The literary:

“Punk rock thriller.”

Oh go fuck yourself. 

Despite everything I said above about not making snap judgements I immediately read that it would be a dark punk rock thriller police procedural and went “Well, guess that’s that” and walked away from the idea of being even vaguely excited about this show, because what I read demonstrated a basic, fundamental lack of grip on what the Watch books are about. 

One, the Watch books aren’t about crime. They really genuinely aren’t. The crimes are macguffins on which to hang social commentary about other things entirely. Even in the very earliest Watch books, when Pterry was still mostly making fun of high fantasy, the crimes the Watch investigated were committed in the service of a larger discussion about things like totalitarianism, interculturalism, and civic life. There’s at least one moment, and I believe several but I’d have to re-read the books to be sure, where Pterry explicitly makes fun of murder mysteries where the hero Solves Crimes Like Sherlock Holmes. Vimes hates clues. Feet Of Clay has an extended subplot about how you 100% cannot trust clues even when the author is the one feeding them to you. I do not want a Watch series that is about Clues.  

Two, the Watch books are explicitly the antithesis of the action genre. They have action in them, but the point is that nobody in these books are action heroes; they’re ordinary people attempting to go about their jobs in a situation where that constantly becomes increasingly difficult. I read “punk rock thriller” and I thought to myself of the dedication of Guards! Guards!: 

They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No one ever asks them if they want to. This book is dedicated to those fine men.

This does get a bit tricky because by the end of Snuff, Vimes is very heroic, almost too heroic for my comfort, but at the same time his heroism is of a very specific sort: he is heroic not because he slaughters the palace guard who get in his way or shoots the baddie or blows up a cop car with a helicopter (or vice versa) but because he deeply, intensely hates those things, and wants nothing to do with them. He is heroic because he is forced into it by circumstance, but spite in the face of monstrousness is what powers him. I think of The Fifth Elephant, where Vimes has just killed a werewolf: 

There were a lot of things he could say. “Son of a bitch!” would have been a good one. Or he could say, “Welcome to civilization!” He could have said, “Laugh this one off!” He might have said, “Fetch!” But he didn’t, because if he had said any of those things then he’d have known that what he had just done was murder.

I don’t trust someone who thinks The Watch should be reimagined as a thriller to understand Sam Vimes. Like, there’s room for interpretation as to Vimes’ character, but there is a fundamental underlying bedrock Vimes is built on and if you don’t grasp the broad points of that, you’re just writing a cop show with some names stitched on.  

Three, the Watch books aren’t a static series, they aren’t like cozy mysteries where the circumstances change but the hero rarely does. That’s nothing against cozy mysteries; I love mystery novels and some of my favorites involve characters who don’t even age over the course of the forty years the books were written in. But you cannot pastiche the Watch and expect it to work. 

Again this is a bit of extrapolation based on low amounts of data but I think it’s probably accurate – the casting indicates that either we’re dealing with the events of Night Watch or at the very least heavily engaged with aspects of it. But Night Watch, while I think it’s one of Pterry’s best books hands down, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is one point in a very specific developmental arc, not just for Vimes but for the entire Watch. If we’re dealing just with the plot of Night Watch (which I don’t think we are) that’s tough to pull off. If, as I suspect, they’re going to be pulling from various aspects of various Watch books, then that’s just fucking nonsense. 

Even Carrot, who is a very constant figure, undergoes some fundamental shifts in personality between Guards! Guards! and, say, The Fifth Elephant. Vimes, while maintaining his personal moral and ethical code, undergoes a radical shift between Guards! Guards! and Night Watch, and he continues to develop emotionally and in some ways spiritually up until Snuff. The Vimes who bitches about diversity in hiring in Men At Arms will not react to any given situation the way the Vimes who befriends the goblins in Snuff will. 

And because these books also all address very specific issues, you can’t just slam them all together and expect to get anything resembling the Watch as Pterry envisioned it over the course of the books.

So while I love the comedy, the characters, the plots, even the macguffin crimes, I believe that a Watch book – a Discworld book of any kind – without that satirical bite is just a high-fantasy husk. There’s no point to it, nothing that sets it apart from a bad Saturday Night Live skit about Game of Thrones. The tv series might actually turn out great and all my concerns will have been unfounded, but first looks aren’t promising on a number of really basic levels. 

So we’ll see. If I’m wrong, great; the show will probably electrify fandom in the same way Good Omens did. If I’m right, well, I had no hopes to begin with, so I’ll just enjoy re-reading Night Watch, which is the book that got me back into fandom and which you can all blame for my presence here today. :D

[verycleverboy]

Trump Postal Service Delivers Body Blow To Small Businesses, People Who Need Medicine

Joe Cortese says his company, NobleSpirit, relies on the U.S. Postal Service to ship thousands of packages containing stamps and collectibles each year. But starting in June, he and his wife, Polly, began noticing problems with shipments.

“When we have something that has value, we are mindful of the progress it is making,” he says from his company's base in rural Pittsfield, New Hampshire. “Packages that would take two, three or four days were literally taking three weeks, even four weeks.”

Cortese, 69, adds, “It was like somebody turned off a switch.”

Customers have contacted his company to ask about the progress of a package, and in some cases, asked for refunds. Sales have softened since the delivery delays began this summer, which Cortese suspects are due to weakening customer confidence that they’ll receive packages on time. The culprit, he believes, is change put in place at the U.S. Postal Service by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who stepped in the role in June.

Those changes, including limiting late deliveries and cracking down on overtime pay that resulted in delays in service across the country,  have drawn scrutiny from lawmakers and customers, with particular concerns about how they affect mail-in ballots and prescription medication deliveries. But businesses like NobleSpirit say they’re also feeling the impact. And the complaints from angry customers are raising anxieties ahead of the busy holiday season.

Meanwhile, other alarming reports are coming in via WDIV-TV Detroit: 

“I work for a pharmacy in New England that provides both mail and pick-up services for retail and specialty medications. Since this summer, we’ve had an increase in patients reporting delays (especially in rural areas) with deliveries of their medications sent via USPS. Many of our specialty medications are refrigerated and sent via FedEx Overnight, but most of our retail prescriptions and non-refrigerated medications are sent via USPS Priority Mail. We typically expect, and relay to our patients, that their medications (sent via USPS) will take 2-3 days to arrive, from the date it ships from our facility. We’ve had an increase in the number of patients reporting delays, and in some cases it takes over a week to arrive.  I work in the call center, so I and my immediate colleagues are typically the ones who hear patient complaints and concerns regarding shipping issues. We’ve also had an increase in issues with tracking the shipments; when I started working here about a year ago, I never had any issues tracking shipments. In the past 6 months, however, I’ve increasingly had shipments where the tracking information in the USPS system is not updated, or non-existent beyond ‘label generated.’ This has caused frustration and concern for both us and our patients; if we can’t tell them where their shipment is when it went out a week ago, because USPS still hasn’t updated the tracking info, we or the patient have to call USPS. This is often a lengthy process of being on hold for up to several hours to reach a representative, so these issues has added a lot to our plates as we have to call USPS to resolve them. Many times we have to send the patient a short supply via FedEx Overnight (which is expensive) or have them fill a short supply at a local pharmacy to ensure they still have their medication while waiting for the delayed shipment, which is complicated to set up, especially with insurances.”

[bomberqueen17]

ugh my stupid W-2s

So I have the issue that somehow, at some point, the payroll company my employer uses got an incorrect social security number for me. I first noticed it several years back, when filing my taxes-- the W-2 had a number on it one digit off from my real SSN, and so I asked my employer to correct it, and then the next year it was still wrong, and I asked them to correct it, and this happened at least three years in a row, maybe four, and it was just one of those things and i didn’t think much about it.

Until, of course, I got furloughed along with the rest of America, and went to get on unemployment, and the Dep’t of Labor was like... You can’t get unemployment if you haven’t worked in the last 18 months. And I was like... ??? I’ve been working at the same place for 11 years??

Oh. They go by SSN, as does basically every thing ever. And like... I don’t know how Social Security actually works, but if the Social Security Whatsit bureau thinks i haven’t had any wages for eleven years now, then am I eligible for social security when I retire? I’ve been paying into the system at every paycheck. 

ARGH

Anyway I’ve been trying to straighten this out since March 20th, and I’ve sent them photocopies of everything, and they sent me a letter that was like “u have never worked” and I sent them back a thing that was like “yes I have here’s all my proof” and i haven’t heard back from that but I figure it was eight weeks to get the first letter and I’d expect like, eight more for the second, but in the meantime...

well, BIL just now called his stepmom who works for Illinois’s Dep’t of Labor, and she was like “ah we have that kind of thing all the time, it takes a while to straighten out but we’d pay the minimum benefit up until then at least.”

I was like.... is the minimum benefit zero because that’s what I’ve been getting. 

Oh, apparently not, so that’s a bummer. Who knows!

She suggested I go to an SSA office in person, which, great, but probably they’re open so I can, so. I should do that, there is one in Troy. But here’s a fun lil wrinkle, I don’t know where my social security card is; my parents had it my whole childhood and I don’t actually know if they ever gave it to me, and if they did, the matter of where I’d’ve put it when I moved out of their house some twenty-five years ago and have moved like eight times since then is a complex one. 

I mean, I also own a passport, but do I have that with me? No, I am 300 miles from my house and haven’t been home in over two weeks, but I wasn’t planning on crossing international borders so all I’ve got on me is my driver’s license.

But I don’t know what to do, and my employer is definitely a big fat pile of No Help Whatsoever in this one. (He was like “payroll company says it’s $50 to send a new W-2, let me know how many of those you want?” and I’m like... is he expecting... me to have fifty dollars... when I have not been paid since March... and if they fix my W-2 does that fix anything at all in my problems? I don’t think it does?)

I went to the SSA website and they were like “create an online account” so I went through the thing and they asked me some astonishingly personal questions (”you had a credit card in 2017, who was the provider” answer: no, “you had an auto loan in 2019, who was the provider?” “... choice C, how did you know that.” “Your middle or former name begins with S, which of these choices is it?” “two were gibberish and one was weird and one was... my actual middle name, interesting.”) and then the page reloaded to the homepage, and I was like... did... that work? So I went to log in and it was like NO ACCOUNT FOUND and then I was like ah no I see, finish creating account, great, and clicked on that and it was like “Enter the verification code we sent you!” 

... I was not sent a verification code, on any of the contact methods I provided when I signed up, unless it’s coming by the fucking postal service??

So that was no help. 

BIL said he was impressed that I don’t seem to have screamed MOTHERFUCKER at any point during all this, and in fact I have not, I have only quietly cried myself to sleep because I don’t understand paperwork and hate numbers and can’t keep things like this straight and it’s a perfect storm of The Shit My ADHD Ass Cannot Fucking Handle, but getting good and mad and yelling cuss words is not something I’m restraining myself from doing because that is not at all my impulse, I think I’m just going to cry quietly in the other room later because that is definitely more my speed here.

*sniffle* why are numbers so terrible to me. It’s not even necessarily about the money? I mean, I haven’t spent any money except on gas since March, I don’t really own anything so it sort of doesn’t matter, but I have literally been paying unemployment insurance and social security for over a decade and I want that to matter in some way? Does nothing matter? I would like to not be so fucking broke but I won’t starve, that’s not the issue, I have immense privilege in that I can just sort of drift endlessly through support networks and not cost anything but at some point I’m going to need to buy myself new underwear and I would dearly love to have my own money to do that with. 

I just. Don’t know. I’ll try again on Monday. Argh. *piteous mumbling*

Adulting doesn’t get easier as you get older, if any of y’all younger than me were wondering. I’d sort of hope age would bring some wisdom but in the department of dealing with government bureaucracies it has in fact not done that at all.

[dustedmagazine]

Bill Meyer: Lockdown pickers 2020

You don’t need me to tell you that it’s been a hell of a year. The pile-on of environmental disaster, the COVID pandemic, people being blasted with teargas for having the temerity to suggest that living while Black shouldn’t be a shooting offense, 70 million-odd Americans endorsing and abetting buffoonish fascism, and the virtual evaporation of live music — and that’s just off the top of my head.  

Still, 2020 has been a great year for recorded music. Working from home and not going out at night has meant more time to play it, and while the supply and production chains have been undeniably wonky (oh yeah, I forgot to mention our departing president’s efforts to drown the US Postal Service in the bathtub and the Apollo Masters factory fire; really, fuck you, 2020), a lot of good records have made it into my house. The year has also yielded creative musical responses by creative music makers to the loss of live performances. Chicago Experimental Sound Studio provided a platform for The Quarantine Concerts, a series of live-streaming and prepared video performances that took us into performers’ homes, basements, back yards and pottery studios (I’m talking about you, Terrie Ex). No, live-streaming is not the same as attending a concert. The experience of community and shared space can’t reach you through a screen. But hearing Joe McPhee send a shout-out from his basement Batcave to Peter Brötzmann, seeing Arto Lindsay struggle with the orientation lock on his phone and getting drawn into the layered environment that Olivia Block created with film projections, played sounds and no help from an intruding cat delivered some of the same authenticity, disaster and wonder that concerts at their best can provide. And if you have had the chance to attend some concerts since March (I’ve seen three; two appearances by improvising ensembles involving Dave Rempis in a park on Chicago’s north side, and an all-outdoor edition of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival on the south side), you probably already know that live music events aren’t the same, either. The feelings of communal trust and safety, the internal shift that says “yup, this is where I’m supposed to be,” is gone. We have a lot to recapture and rebuild once the pandemic passes.  

The sales and streaming platform, Bandcamp, became a hero simply by virtue of simply treating musicians like people who need a hand rather resources to be sucked dry and discarded. The monthly Bandcamp Fridays, when the company refrained from taking its cut and passed that percentage along to the artists and labels, afforded fans a direct way to help out folks whose work was getting them through the day, and allowed people who had lost all their performing opportunities a chance to make a little money. Some players took the opportunity to release music solely through Bandcamp. English soprano/tenor saxophonist John Butcher has issued seven titles collectively dubbed The Memory of Live Music. They are a sequence of previously unreleased, archival concert recordings monthly, all splendid musical statements, but also reminders of what we have been missing. Chicago saxophonist Dave Rempis’ Aerophonic Records likewise posted live recordings of short-lived ensembles like the Outskirts that he’d never gotten around to documenting, as well as one-off encounters, such as a marvelously wooly 2012 concert with guitarist Terrie Ex and drummer Tim Daisy at Milwaukee’s Sugar Maple.  

But Bandcamp also gave some musicians an opportunity to create outside the frameworks of physical recordings and performance in physical proximity. Soprano/tenor saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and her husband, drummer Tom Rainey, used her Bandcamp page as a conduit for Stir Crazy, a semi-weekly series of home recordings. Each installment lasts 15 or 20 minutes, and it might be a free improvisation, a run through a friend or inspirational elder’s compositions, or a topical commentary, such as the loving, skeletal performances of tunes from the American Songbook that they offered a few days after the election. And jazz clarinetist Ben Goldberg has kept a Plague Diary of nearly-daily sketches for clarinet and electric keyboard. Some celebrate friends, colleagues, family members, and historical figures; others simply work out an idea. It feels a bit like an invitation to look over the guy’s shoulder and see how his notions come into being.  

Other parties made the circumstances of the time into a premise for new work. Mary Staubitz (Donna Parker) and Russ Waterhouse (Blues Control) reached out to fellow musicians to contribute to Distant Duos. Each candidate’s mission was to improvise for five minutes while thinking of another player, who would likewise improvise for five minutes while thinking of their counterpart. Then Waterhouse and Parker would combine the tracks. The circumscribed duration and prior acquaintance kept collaborations by the likes of Kryssi Battalene / Jayson Gerycz and Jeb Bishop / Joseph Mauro charged and focused.  And the Swiss label Insub instituted Distances, for which it enlisted eight composers (including Michael Pisaro-Liu, Ryoko Akama and Sarah Hennies) to devise pieces to be performed by two physically remote musicians (such as Mike Majkowski & Cyril Bondi, or Cristián Alvear & Violeta Motta). Each contribution consists of two videos, one a sequence of interviews with the composer and the players, the other a split-screen projection of the music being played. And if you want to take the music home, you can always buy it on Bandcamp.  

But the response that compelled me most is AMPLIFY 2020: quarantine, an online festival of new work initiated by Estwhile Records’ Jon Abbey. On March 12, as concert seasons canceled and countries went to lockdown, Abbey and a circle of associates invited sound artists to contribute newly recorded pieces. Over the next six months they posted 240 pieces to Facebook and Bandcamp. Most were solo works, but several were blind duos for which musicians with shared histories and separate addresses submitted solo pieces with the understanding that they’d be mixed together. At the end of the festival, Taku Unami combined sounds from all 240 pieces into a final entry, “All Together Now.” The works encompassed paint-stripping noise, solemn études, field recordings, electronic music, musique concrete, improvisations, compositions, and works that combined several of the aforementioned methods. The contributors included people you probably know (Tom Carter, Toshimaru Nakamura, Sarah Hennies, Vanessa Rossetto), others I certainly didn’t (Fangyi Liu, Asha Sheshadri), and one who also writes for Dusted (Michael Rosenstein). They made diaries of their circumscribed days, laments for lost experiences and memorials for friends who died during the festival’s duration. There are too many good ones to name, so I’ll just single out a couple performers whose work especially touched me. Reinier van Houdt’s first piece, “drift nowhere past (22 march 2020),” marvelously captured the still loneliness of life that had shrunk to what you could perceive through a window or a screen. Five subsequent monthly instalments came to feel like notes of progress from an ongoing search for purpose and grace. And the radio captures that make up Keith Rowe’s “GF SUC,” recorded as Black Lives Matters protests arose around the world, imparted sadness beyond words; I’ve heard no music that was truer to the tragedy of this time. 

Bill Meyer

[thesevillereport]

In Focus: U.S. Infrastructure

Infrastructure is something we hear a lot about on the presidential campaign trail, and usually very little about after the president is elected. After the election, when we do hear about infrastructure, the plan is a scaled down version of what was promised on the campaign trail.

Recently the Biden administration proposed a $2.25 trillion infrastructure package, and Republicans have countered with a $568 billion proposal. Another example of something that is vital to the country's growth and that benefits us all becoming a red vs blue issue, and it shouldn't be.

If you're a conservative and you think the dems want to spend too much, the American Society of Civil Engineers estimated that it would take $3.6 trillion to rebuild America's infrastructure. I'm one to always listen to the professionals, the people who get paid to do what they do for a living.

There are a number of issues that I believe both parties should stand united on, and the country's infrastructure should be one of them, because it has played a vital role in the U.S.'s economic success of the past and will determine how prosperous the country will be in the future.

We've Come a Long Way

In the mid 1800s, to get mail from the east coast to California it took a battery of steamboats and riverboats. Steamboats moved down the east coast to Nicaragua, then river boats took the trek through Nicaragua to the Pacific Ocean, and then another steamboat to finish the voyage to California. This was before railroads became the extensive network that they would become. For people looking to travel from coast to coast back then, the voyage took more than 20 days, but the railroads would change all of that.

The construction of a transcontinental railroad was made possible by Congress passing of the Pacific Railway Act in 1862. The government also provided land grants to several railroad companies. Railroads were largely a private undertaking, but without the government's assistance, a national network of railroads may have never happened when it did.

Because the U.S. had a national rail system in place, Sears, Roebuck, and Co. founded in 1983 would be able to leverage the railroads to create jobs and build wealth for their owners and investors.

The extensive railroad system would make for a better postal service. A postal service that Amazon would later leverage to build a massive amount of wealth for its founder and investors, while employing thousands of Americans.

Reverse the Aging Process and Prosper

Our electrical infrastructure is old (remember the 2003 blackout?), our rails are old, our water utility infrastructure is old, our roads are old, and our bridges are old. A family member, who is a long-distance truck driver, recently told me there are some bridges that he has to say a small prayer before driving over because they're in such bad shape.

While administration after administration after administration has whiffed on revamping our infrastructure we've seen entrepreneurs push the limits of the current infrastructure. One of Donald Trump's issues with Amazon had to do with how the company somewhat abused the postal system, which could be a whole post on its own.

The national issue over net neutrality has me wanting what I've always had when it comes to the internet, but as an investor understanding that for AT&T, to build out the infrastructure needed to support the country's growing streaming habits, they need a decent return on their investment.

In the U.S. the broadband infrastructure came into question during the initial weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown. Experts wondered out loud if networks could handle the surge in streaming created by people stuck at home. Companies like Netflix, Disney, and Amazon cut the quality of their videos to prevent overloads to the system. In addition, Sony throttled game downloads to reduce strain to the network. 

Luckily, networks were able to hold during the pandemic, but how will our current networks fear if we were to lockdown again in 10 years, without having updated the infrastructure? A decade from now we'll have more items connected to the network, as more homes employ the use of smart devices, and more automobiles get connected to the network.

A massive infrastructure spend is just smart business. From the companies hired to complete projects, and the employees those companies hire to work on the projects. Not to mention the companies that will use the infrastructure for their benefit like Sears used the railroads, Amazon used the post office, and trucking companies use the interstate highways. It's confusing to me why infrastructure is such a divisive issue, when politicians know that the last major spend dates back to Eisenhower's National Interstate and Defense Highway Act of 1956.

On the other side of the world we have China spending big on infrastructure inside and outside of China. If you're one that sees China's new belt and road initiative as suspicious, that's on you, but the country's economy continues to grow with every city they invest in, every bridge, road, and high speed rail they build.

I think of infrastructure as the foundation to a country's growth. America's next major growth phase will depend on how it upgrades its infrastructure, from railways, highways, and waterways, to public schools, broadband, water, and the electrical infrastructure. Will we see big sweeping upgrades or more patch work?

When infrastructure gets better, we all get better. Cloud computing, streaming services, online gaming wouldn't be possible if we were all using dial up. Amazon Prime probably wouldn't be a thing if our roads, rails, and airports weren't as good as they are. Americans have gotten a lot out of the infrastructure since FDR's plan saved democracy, but now it's time to upgrade.

We're stepping into an era where cars are going to drive themselves, drones are going to deliver our packages, and close to 90% of the population will have a smartphone. Our infrastructure needs to start looking more like the Jetsons and less like the Flintstones.

[heartslogos]

the declassified texts of the inquisition’s elite [170]

(325):  There’s a child, alone, sitting on a picnic table out there, making bird noises - (715):  I thought it was your cat but I was wrong your Roomba is possessed by a pissed-off evil spirit. -

“That’d be Kieran,” Leliana says. “Morrigan, I found Kieran. And by that I mean Cullen’s found Kieran. He seems to be alright. Should we leave him be?”

“What’s he doing?” Morrigan asks, pausing as she’s turning the page of a research report Leliana had dug up for her to review.

“Making bird noises in one of the communal greens of the Inquisition’s residential area.”

“Which residential area? He’s by himself?”

Leliana quickly texts the question to Cullen. “Why, was someone specific supposed to be watching him?”

“Not necessarily. I left him at the child care center,” Morrigan replies. “Not that I would blame them for losing track of Kieran. He’s willful. And creative. He’s…elusive at the best of times.”

“Is that him taking after you or Theron, do you think?”

“I think he’s cherry picking our worst traits,” Morrigan deadpans. “In this case my distrust of authority and Theron’s incredible knack for escaping from anywhere and anyone. Would that our son pick up some of our good traits as well. Aside from Theron’s athleticism, of course.”

“Cullen says that he’s got time to stay with Kieran until someone picks him up, or Cullen can bring Kieran with him and drop him off with somebody on his way to his next meeting. He doesn't see anyone else around. And it’s the green close to the small creek. The one where someone put up a tire swing.”

“This Inquisition of yours is too large,” Morrigan says, “You’ve essentially taken half the mountain as yours. You’re an entire country of your own. Surely someone, somewhere, has some sort of protest to this slow moving invasion of yours?”

“Well. If they do they’re not very good at making a case for it because we just got another few acres on the other side for expansion,” Leliana replies dryly. “I think it’s to be used to build more on site facilities.”

“You have your own mailing zip code and branch of the postal service working within the Inquisition. How large, exactly, do you plan on expanding? Of course, this does not take into account the several off site auxiliary branches and offices you’ve established.”

“I leave such planning to Josephine. My sort of infrastructure isn’t the kind you can see. Well. Leave Kieran to his activities or have Cullen bring him somewhere else?”

Morrigan shakes her head. “Kieran won’t follow Rutherford. I’ll go fetch him myself and bring him back here. I don’t suppose you’ve changed so much that you don’t have colorful markers and spare paper in your desk.”

Leliana reaches into one of her desk drawers and pulls out a metal tin that she pops open to reveal several markers, colored pencils, and crayons.

“The art of forgery requires a wide and varied tool kit, Morrigan. Don’t underestimate me.” - “Oh, you’ve upgraded in life and gotten yourself an automated cleaning machine have you?” Dorian grins as Evelyn stares into the middle distance. “A sign that life as the Inquisitor of Thedas is looking up, or at least upper middle class?”

“Funny, Dorian. We’ve got more important things at hand to question. Why does Maxwell think I have a cat? We live in the same house. He would know if I got a cat. He knows I got the roomba. He made me get it. I wanted to get a cheaper version but he insisted on getting the actual Roomba. And then he bullied me into writing it off as an expense.”

“You? Get bullied into something? Shall pigs begin o fly next? Have the Orlesians abandoned their masks? Will the Fereldan dog lords be less aggressive about denying their entirely logical and perfectly acceptable fondness for other species of animal?”

“I’m serious. Why does Max think I have a cat?”

“Shouldn’t the more pressing question be what was your Roomba doing that Maxwell thought it was a sentient creature stalking your home at night? Don’t they have a very…well. Mechanical and recognizable sound? Wouldn’t it be somewhat like listening to a refrigerator?”

“Spoken as someone who’s never had a roomba in their home,” Evelyn says. “That thing can make some really weird noises. Especially when it gets stuck somewhere like on the edge of a rug or when trying to get over electrical cords. But there’s nothing I’ve ever heard it do that would make me think ‘a that’s an angry cat’. Priorities Dorian. Why does Max think I have a cat? If he’s got the idea that I have a cat it must’ve come from somewhere. And it certainly isn’t me. I would’ve told him if I’m bringing in a pet.”

Evelyn turns to Dorian.

“Dorian. What do you think the chances are that someone’s snuck an animal into my house? And by someone I mean Ellana.”

“Let’s be fair now. It could be Cole.”

Dorian and Evelyn fall into silence as they think that over.

“What are the chances you think Cole’s snuck an animal into my house and has been secretly raising in there when I’m not present?” Evelyn amends her previous question.

“High,” Dorian answers instantly. “The chances, Evelyn, are very, very high. The question is, who do you ask to confirm that? Cole or Varric?”

Evelyn releases a heavy sigh, tapping the edge of her phone against her forehead. “You might as well ask me if I’d rather talk to a wall or a hand.”

“Very true. Both are bad. Cole won’t understand what the problem is and Varric will try to dodge the question and then deal with the issue himself later before you can get around to it. Now isn’t this a real puzzle you’ve gotten yourself in?” Dorian holds a hand up. “Wait. Before we get further side tracked by this delightful and for the most part low stakes, harmless, mystery of yours — you better tell your cousin that you don’t have a cat.”

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

What do you think Napoleon would feel about the Le Pens? Like I know he’d hate their guts but the extent 👀

God fuck the Le Pens. I feel dirty thinking about them. (Though weirdly funny that Marine kicked her dad out of FN. Like you know you’re too deep down the rabbit hole of fuckery when Marine kicks you out. [and yeah, of course it’s all part of her image cleaning up gimmick. Wherein I’m sure she thinks the same as him, but is trying to “soften” the image of the party. And, based on the last election, it’s working. So that’s horrifying.]) All this to say: fuck the Le Pens; white supremacy etc. 

Anyway - assuming we’re still going for “Napoleon from 1815 woke up August 22, 2020″ base for our thought experiments here. 

Overall, yeah he’d think them short sighted, idiotic, and would probably have some elegant-yet-crude insults for them in Corsican. Let us take a brief, and not at all comprehensive, stroll down the Le Pens (and FN by default)’s terrible policies. Then I can scrub my brain out because they are absolutely foul people. 

behind a cut because it’s long. 

Economics: First off, Napoleon and I are the same in that we neither know anything about economics. He did not have a firm grasp on how the economy worked. Which I sympathise with, because it seems very fake and made up. 

Anyway, he did a lot of modernization, raised taxes, created a lot of public works programs to stimulate the economy and improve connectivity (gotta build all the roads and canals. Actually though, as a public infrastructure keener, I support this). He did lay the foundation for the centralized bank of France. (Something Biddle would get all hot and bothered over. Nothing sexier than centralized banks.)

Napoleon also introduced a whole loan system for businesses to try and keep them afloat and improve local industry. He was keen on protecting property rights, um, tried to regulate the currency to protect it against inflation. Idk, he did other things that I’m not going to get into. 

Comparing Napoleon’s hot economic takes from 1815 to 2020? A bit hard. So I’m going to guestimate on this. 

I think, once he understood how the world functions now, he would be pro-globalization and the various free trade agreements that are in place (CETA, PCAs etc). He might disagree with details therein, but the broad philosophy is one I think he’d support. 

I don’t know if he would be pro-single currency. I suspect he might be anti-the Euro, while still supporting the broad intents of the EU. 

He would support a strong public sector - so government controlled postal service, utilities, schools etc. In that, and the anti-Euro view, he would align with Marine, at least. Not sure about her POS father. 

No idea what his views on the Havana Charter would be. Probably mixed. 

EU: I’ve touched on this before, I think Napoleon would be pro-EU, over all. He’d just think France should be the hegemonic power. Why isn’t France making all the decisions? This is dumb. Who does Germany think they are? Etc. Therefore, he would disagree with the Le Pens who think the EU is the anti-christ and the cause of everything bad that ever happened in France (I exaggerate, but they do blame the EU for a lot of things so you know, it’s not that much of a stretch).

Immigration: This is where they would diverge significantly. Like apples and moldy toast kind of different. I’ve touched on Napoleon’s immigration policy before, so I’m not going to wade into it again. But yeah, needless to say Napoleon would be like “let everyone come. They want to come to France? They are French. More is better. The end.” 

The only thing is, he was very pro-assimilation. Not really into the “patchwork quilt” approach to the philosophy (and implementation) of multiculturalism. Which, to be fair, is a very modern view and not something I would expect anyone from 1815 to agree with, or consider a general good approach to dynamic, multicultural societies. 

But yeah, the Le Pens whole moratorium on immigration, hatred of anyone foreign, that would be an anathema to Napoleon. He would vehemently disagree with that stance. Napoleon believed alloys were stronger. You took different people, boiled them down, and melded them into a unified French identity. That was his Hot Take on the matter. Again, pro-assimilation, which is an inherently conservative stance by 21st century standards, but a very average stance by early 19th century standards. His immigration and citizenship views were overall liberal for the time. 

Indeed, the whole creation of a unified French identity was in its infancy during his life. He contributed heavily to it, but for his lifetime, identity was strongly linguistic and regional. You’re Gascon before you’re French, you’re Basque before you’re either French or Spanish, that sort of thing. 

And of course, his views on this were heavily informed by his own experience and identity as a Frenchman and how it was received, or not, by his own people, as well as other monarchs and countries. (Tsar Alexander liked to brag that he spoke better French than the Emperor of France. And I believe the Times once called Napoleon a “Mediterranean mongrel.” Charming. So, he had a fun and exciting adventure in European class, ethnic and racial politics of the early 19th century.)

Napoleon would also disagree with the Le Pens that citizenship and nationality are indivisible. He was into the whole “if you decide you are French then you are French, no matter which side of the Rhine you were born on”. 

Secularism: They’d actually probably mostly agree on this. In that religion has no part or place in government and there should be a clear and strong separation of church and state. 

The banning of religious clothing, though, I don’t think Napoleon would support that. I would argue that he’d think it infringed on personal rights too much, and he was keen on protecting those. Like, his policy towards integrating France’s Jewish population was to try and assimilate them, yes, because he viewed everything as being consumed by the monolith that was the French Empire. But he wasn’t like “no wearing a tallit or kippah.”

Abortion: Guys, Napoleon is a culturally Catholic man from 1815 who thought women’s crowing jewel were her children and that France really needed to increase its overall population. I think we can all figure out what his views on abortion would be. Marine is pro-legality of abortion, but she personally is like “it’s eViL and a serious MoRaL IsSuE” etc. 

Gay Rights: Napoleon’s whole political approach was to bring in the people on the margins and normalize them (assimilate; one of us, one of us) as a means to increase the base of the population who would support him. As he viewed marriage as a strictly secular, civil ceremony, and not a religious one, there could be a possibility of slowly talking him around to it. That said, he also viewed marriage as a declaration of intent to make many babies (for his army). I don’t think he’d be pro-queer couples adopting, no matter what. So, who knows. 

That said, he wasn’t like “lock up the gays”. And as gay marriage is established in France currently, I don’t know if he’d be pro-abolition since it’s mostly a popular/accepted law and he was all about that sweet, sweet public approval rating. 

So if he came around to it, it wouldn’t be for altruistic reasons. At the same time, he wouldn’t be like “make it illegal”. He was very “w/e just show up to work on time Cambaceres, jesus.” (Cambaceres: It’s midnight, sire. This isn’t normal work hours. Napoleon: SAYS WHO???) 

Women in Politics: Well he’s obviously 100% against that. Ladies belong at home with the bebes. Le Pens, obviously, aren’t. Though Jean, I think, is like Trump where he’s pro his daughter being in politics (until she chucked him out of FN), but he would expect his wife to be a Proper Housewife. That weird conservative man thing about the role of wives and daughters. 

-

There’s my fly-over guestimation of Napoleon v Le Pens

It’s very, very hard to figure out what Napoleon, a man born in 1769 and died in 1821, would think about politics, economics and society in 2020. I tried to gauged based on his broad, philosophical views and how he acted as ruler. But he was also someone who was very analytical and would be capable of understanding the world as it is today and the realities that are in place. He might find them off putting or bizarre (ladies as heads of states?? what about your children??) but he was an imminently pragmatic man who would look at a situation and go “alright, this is the reality of the system and society I am now in” and would adjust himself accordingly. 

In the end, trying to figure out how a man from 1815 would react to today’s politics is very difficult, if not outright impossible. His understanding of what liberal meant, what conservative meant, etc. were so different to our understanding that I would never place him in one camp. He had changing, dynamic views, and that would be reflected in his understanding of politics in 2020. 

Overall, I think he would disagree with a lot of the stances of the Le Pens. Would he hate them? No. Because Napoleon didn’t really hate people based on their political views. He saw too much of the Revolution to go for extreme personal reactions to political stances; also he was too much a pragmatist and understood that you never know who might be an ally in the future. 

Napoleon might look down on the Le Pens, he might find them personally disgusting, he might view them as stupid (honestly, he’d probably just think they’re dumb and quickly move on), but he wouldn’t hate them. 

-

Because this is tumblr, I must now declare my political stance because I was too calm in most of that assessment. 

1. Fuck the Le Pens & Front Nationale 

2. Nationalism is spooky and I am always suspect when it comes up in political discourse in the year of our lord 2020 

3. I am bi and non-binary, which isn’t actually a political stance (or a personality), but tumblr is Like That so I thought I’d include it. 

4. I support: lgbtq rights; trans rights; universal health care; easy and open access to education; improved access to education at primary school levels (because that’s a huge impact on people); ACAB; separation of church and state; prison reform/some form of abolishment - I’m still thinking through my views on this and how it should be approached; land back; Aboriginal and Treaty Rights; immigration; no more kids in cages jesus christ; don’t drink bleach; democracy is good, punch fascists etc. etc. 

[sakurasakiyama]

Personal: My Parcels Adventure Around Most of Australia

Now this is a pretty funny story, but to start it off, I will give a little bit of a backstory of my history with this shipping method in the past and some of the things that have happened before. This shipping method is pretty good, but I’ve had some problems with it in the past. There are quite a few locations of it within the country (mainly within capital cities and surrounding areas, not out in the countryside), but it’s probably more used by corporate business that can get discounts on shipments. This is a little bit long so I’ll put it under a cut.

Back when I used to get things shipped directly to Australia from Amazon Japan, I had a few little issues with shipping. They were good the majority of the time, I just had a few little hiccups occasionally. One being my delivery of my FIVE DVD box & CD+DVD being later than estimated and showing up in a different box (as either the box was broken in transit or they opened it, I still don’t know to this very day); and the another is one of my magazines (Sparkle Vol.33) being signed for as ‘delivered’ but I never got it, then it showed up a few days later.

Coming back to the present, I bought some goods with my proxy as a birthday present to myself, and because my usual shipping method is suspended temporarily for the time being, in order to get my goods safely, I went with the next best option that I’ve used before. So it got shipped off as normal and everything was going okay. It got to Sydney to go through customs and sorting, but the second it left the facility in Sydney, it was meant to come to Melbourne. But, you’re wrong, it ended up in Brisbane xD At the time I was so confused why and even said to myself, “Where is it going to go next? South Australia or something?”. But it ended up arriving in Melbourne the day after.

It arrived to Melbourne on Saturday and was hoping it would come early in the week. I waited and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday passed, it hasn’t arrived yet. Until on Friday morning, I got a text saying it would be delivered today, along with the tacking with the local postal service (as I had the tracking details from the shipping method at the beginning and that’s usually the only tracking I have). I don’t usually get texts about it being delivered and if I’ll be home, but I responded anyway. I then decided to look at the tracking from the postal service to see what took so long. It was in the Melbourne area on Sunday, but then on Wednesday, it ended up in Adelaide! (・Д・)

At the time I had no idea why it went to Adelaide, but I felt like I jinxed myself with what I said and was wondering what on Earth were they doing. When continuing to look through the postal service tracking, it ended up back in Melbourne the next day and on its way to me on Friday. So it had arrived to me midday Friday (but couldn’t look at it until tonight). And as I look at the shipping label on my package, my proxy may have made a mistake by putting my town name on there twice, one of them being where the state probably should have been. But then I decided to do some checking and saw that there’s a town with the same name as mine in Brisbane, and a street and shopping center with the same name in Adelaide. Which would explain why it went to both of those states xD However, if they looked at the labels, they could have noticed that it has ‘AU-MEL’ written on it for Melbourne, and they could have checked which town/state by looking at my postcode when going through the sorting facilities it ended up at xD

So in the end, my parcel had a good little adventure to some parts of Australia before arriving to me xD Mind you the amount of money I had to spend on this shipping method was a bit insane (as my proxy isn’t a corporate business, so it’s more expensive than it would be with Amazon Japan that’s a corporate business for example), but at least it got a bonus with the short tour to 4 different states including my own xD

[youandthemountains]

Tell me about your crimes! 15, 22 and 26!

15. What are your three favorite crimes in principal?

Conspiracy because I love group projects, bank robbery, art forgery. ALSO I misread the question at first and thought it was asking for specific instances of crime which reminded me of one of my favorite recent crime stories:

This guy in Chicago filed a change of address form requesting to redirect mail intended for the USPS HQ in Atlanta to his apartment in Chicago. He originally signed the form with his initials then scratched them out and wrote UPS. They approved his request and for 3 MONTHS he was getting the Postal Services mail

He received so much mail that the mail carrier had to leave it in a USPS tub outside his door, the Tribune reports.

He was able to deposit $58,000 worth of checks before the USPS was like hey why does this guy have so much mail. I personally think he shouldn't have been charged because SO MANY people dropped the ball here. He was just like lol wonder if this very obvious bit of hijinks will work, and it did and it kept working

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/10/610102872/man-allegedly-used-change-of-address-form-to-move-ups-headquarters-to-his-apartm

There's also this scam, which obviously I don't approve of but is such a good story and I want to see the movie. Also this article doesn't mention it but one of the people she scammed was a UChicago economics professor which I for one find hilarious

22. Imagine you're in a heist film, which of the classic roles (planner, hacker, face, acrobat, distraction etc.) would you be?

Honestly? Distraction probably

26. What's the most reckless thing you ever did that paid off?

I can't REMEMBER my past. I think I told you the gator story - I was camping with my friends as a dumb teen and we went too far out too late. There was a bridge we crossed in the day time without issue, it was wide open and we didn't give it a second thought. We did meet an Indian fisherman with the thickest redneck accent who proceeded to wrassle a gator after a little girl ran up too close to it.

Anyway, it had gotten dark and we had to cross the bridge again to get back to the cabin. Except at this hour it was absolutely lousy with alligators. We didn't really have a choice here - there was no other way to get back without crossing the river and getting into swampy water you can't see hardly seemed like a better idea.

As an adult, I've learned that apparently the best thing to do when encountering a gator is to make yourself look huge and act loud and aggressive. That seemed like the worst possible plan in front of what looked like hundreds of gators that appeared to be sleeping, so instead we decided to sneak past them. We turned off the flashlight, let our eyes adjust to the dark, and tiptoed through the gaps. I've never been so attuned to every sound in a scrub and it's still the best dance I've ever done.

As soon as we got to the other side we finally let out our breaths and skedaddled to home. It was THRILLING, my friend's mom was furious with me especially when she heard the whole story but man somehow it worked and we all got back safe. To this day my least favorite thing about bodies of water outside of Florida is the lack of gators. Where's the adventure???

[conniejoworld]

DAVE LIEBER Our test of the post office delivers sad results O K, we know the mail is late. Often very late. Now The Watchdog can prove it. I ran a mail test last week by sending letters across Dallas-Fort Worth. The results are an embarrassment. The post office is looking at what could be its worst service breakdown in its 228-year history. You know most of the reasons: Overtime was halted. Blue collection boxes were taken off the streets. Sorting machines were disconnected and decommissioned like old Navy ships taken to a scrap yard. But The Watchdog has discovered another reason for mail not getting delivered on time. You probably didn’t hear about this reason. Starting in late July, before the delivery crisis began, the U.S. Postal Service launched a surprise test for mail carriers. The test came with a name that’s just mumbo-jumbo enough to confuse you. It’s called the Expedited Street/Afternoon Sortation test. A better name would be “the Carriers Only Get 15 to 30 Minutes to Get Out the Door Test.” Its purpose, according to top officials announcing it, is “to assist in reducing the morning office time for city letter carriers by enabling them to get on the street earlier.” The goal was “to enhance customer service by providing more consistent delivery times.” But here’s what happened. The test was unprecedented because it disrupted the normal flow of mail delivery. Almost 400 branches across the nation were ordered to participate, but I’m told that many other branches ended up testing some aspect of it. Inside the post office, it was nicknamed “Grab what’s there and go.” Carriers had 30 minutes (in some cases only 15) to finish prepping their mail for delivery, checking their vehicle, grabbing their scanner and keys and departing. Whatever mail was not sorted before that new grab-and-go deadline was left behind. There was always tomorrow to deliver the rest. Maybe. Within days, mail got backed up almost everywhere. With the elimination of overtime, no one was getting paid to finish the daily delivery. Undelivered mail was stored inside or left on loading docks. USPS’ own delivery standards were ignored. Among the late arrivals: medicines, income checks, bills. (Cue the dying baby chicks.) “The mail being processed was drastically delayed,” said Kimetra Lewis, president of the Dallas chapter of the National Association of Letter Carriers. The stress among her carriers was palpable. “The carriers were calling me on a regular basis” to complain, she said. “Nearly every office was implementing their own version of the test,” she said. “This test was totally different from ones in the past,” says Yared Wonde, president of the Dallas branch of the American Postal Workers Union. “This one is, if the mail is not cleared by 9 a.m., leave it on the floor for the next day.” You may have noticed my sources for this information are two local union presidents. That’s because for the first time in 15 years covering USPS, their media representatives are not allowed to talk to me. “We are not currently providing any interviews,” usually helpful spokesman Albert Ruiz told me. He didn’t give a reason, but I found it in a USPS directive that could have been titled “Our Bunker Mentality.” ‘Consistent message’ Vice.com first reported contents of the order: “The Postal Service continuously strives to project a positive image, protect its brand, and present a unified message to the customers and communities it serves,” the memo begins. “It is imperative that one person speaks on behalf of the Postal Service to deliver an appropriate, accurate and consistent message to the media.” And that one person is new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, whose fast retreat from enacting his supposed reforms included everything but waving a white flag. After a people’s revolt led to bipartisan criticism from lawmakers, DeJoy issued a statement that he was pulling back. In one of the biggest retreats since Gen. Robert E. Lee fled the Battle of Gettysburg, DeJoy, who has donated more than $1 million to President Donald Trump’s campaign funds, promised to halt drastic actions that he and his minions had pushed in his first weeks on the job. In a forced change of heart, DeJoy vowed to maintain post office hours, leave mail sorting machines and blue collection boxes alone, keep facilities open and restore overtime. DeJoy vowed in his published statement: “To avoid even the appearance of any impact on election mail, I am suspending these initiatives until after the election is concluded.” That sounds counter to Trump’s motives. He has said that he initially opposed more funding for troubled USPS and hoped to avoid “universal mail-in voting” in his reelection bid. Yes, the postal service has massive short-term and long-term problems. But is now the right time to break the vast system into dysfunctional pieces? Ellis Burgoyne, who ran the Texas region as Southwest vice president 15 years ago before his promotion to USPS’ chief information officer, is now retired in Irving. He told me, “Holding mail a day to process was always a no-no. ... Total elimination of overtime and intentionally leaving first-class mail behind was never an option. We never had that, and I worked there for 35 years.” Sorting machines Why would you remove and dismantle working sorting machines in the midst of all these other changes unless you wanted to bog down the system, maybe even make it harder for mail-in election ballots to reach their destination before deadlines? Aside from the people in the processing plants, mechanical sorters are the heart of mail delivery. Wonde of the postal workers union estimates that between Dallas’ Main Post Office near Interstate 30 and the North Texas Processing and Distribution Center in Coppell, a dozen sorting machines have been removed in recent weeks. “They didn’t give any specific reason for that,” he said. “I officially requested how many machines were removed and how many were decommissioned.” He hasn’t heard back. Wonde said workers tried to put one of the machines back in operation at the Dallas plant, but they were missing important parts. My test I mentioned my test. Until a few years ago, a first-class letter mailed within North Texas, from and to a local address and dropped off before 5 p.m., usually arrived the next day. Now USPS service standards allow for a letter mailed locally to arrive in two days instead of one. How’s that working? I took addresses for 50 Dallas Morning News employees who live in Dallas-Fort Worth. On Monday night, I mailed 50 envelopes to them from my city post office. I also emailed my lucky 50 to let them know they’d been drafted into my experiment. Under USPS standards, all letters should have arrived in two days — by Thursday’s mail. But more than half didn’t. Only 21 arrived on time — or 42%. That’s a failing grade. Five more arrived one day late on Friday. As of Saturday morning, as I complete this, I’ve yet to hear back about 24 others, or 48%. Admittedly, this is no scientific survey. But with half of the sent letters failing to meet the goal, it’s an indicator. (The Watchdog wants to check again during early voting.) Burgoyne, the retired former USPS vice president for Texas, added that when he was in management, “Election and political mail, including ballots, had the highest priority.” (We’ll see if that tradition holds.) Lewis of the letter carriers’ union says she worries about the cost of this mess to USPS’ reputation: “We don’t know if our customers lost confidence in us. It’s frightening.” If you desire a mail-in absentee ballot, contact your county elections office for information. You can also request one online. Requests for mail ballots must be made before Oct. 23. Make sure you fill out your ballot and send it back as soon as possible. To qualify, you must be 65 or older, disabled or out of your home county on Election Day. The last day to register to vote is Oct. 5. Twitter: @DaveLieber