#There are definitely also more resources out there

[ramblingandpie]

[Image description: screencap of tags reading #so many thoughts about the notes here

#i'm just gonna say that the civil servants i know who are just trying

to make society work are often begging for more people to opine

#there are secure white people with nothing better to do who spend

all their time making their opinions heard

#just to feel alive

#i cant guarantee anything but i know there are people in

government who would want to help your voice be heard

#if only you knew who to speak to

#so start saying what it is you need to say to everybody you might

possibly need to say it to

#and get better at saying it #and make your thoughts known

#because there are people who your thoughts matter to

#yes even in a red state

#i don't in any way believe the way our government works is ideal but

you need to use the tools that are available to you to make life bette

#civil and otherwise.

End description.]

This particular civil servant would love if folks would use alt text.

And also, yes, please send in feedback. We want to know. We need to know. Sometimes I know something is An Problem but unless people complain I am not allocated resources to fix Yon Problemme. We literally keep binders of program feedback sorted by topic. We use them to make our plans and agendas of what to work on and where to allocate resources.

We care!! We want the program to go smoothly!! And! If you're like "oh but this is a minor problem" we may genuinely have no idea!! Typically, the people who are doing the regulatory work and procedure updates and such? Are NOT the frontline staff who sees "minor" problems. Like. I see the most messed up of claims where everything has gone wrong and while yes obviously those DO need to be addressed... I also am completely out of the loop on more minor issues unless someone tells me. And sometimes it's a really easy fix!!! Or it's something we can incorporate into something else we're working on!!! And I try to be proactive (like... if I'm working on an update for A Chonker Of A Problem, I try to reach out to people who deal even remotely with that problem and ask them to please tell me any and all issues they run into, because like... if I have to remake a form? I'd rather do it right????)

Anyway wow this has turned into a rant but yes there are definitely civil servants who care. Most of us, I reckon.

Strongly recommend calling your reps and freaking out on the phone, both as a self care practice and so they can know that their normally chill constituents are saying things like “I guess if I can’t teach kindergarten teachers to be nicer anymore I shall have to become a bonus army”

[just1cefor4ll]

—squid game characters with a s/o who struggles w/ self harm

warning. swearing, not proof read, mentions of drugs, sh, might be OOC

characters. Kim Jun-hee, Hwang In-ho, Hwang Jun-ho, Kang Dae-ho, Cho Sang-woo, Choi Su-bong/Thanos

—Hwang Jun-ho

since he is a cop, he’d most likey notice your change in behaviour fairly quickly

he’d feel deeply hurt because he didn’t pay attention to his s/o enough to stop this from happening sooner—but he’d keep his emotions in check to focus on your wellbeing

would outright ask what’s troubling you but would definitely not push you if you feel that the topic is too sensitive

baby steps!! don’t push yourself >:((

he’d want to understand what’s causing your distress and reassure you you’re not alone.

might look up professional resources or reach out to someone he trusts for guidance

as an officer, he and many of his co-workers are encouraged to seek therapy as well and after he got shot by his brother he had frequented his visits— so he somewhat knew what you were getting yourself into and calmed you down if you felt nervous the first time you went

would drive you to and from the therapist, always waiting with your favourite snack or drink but wouldn’t really ask too much about it

stays close and checks in often

would make sure you never feel isolated, even in small ways like texting or keeping you company during his breaks when he’s on shift

wouldn’t push too hard but wouldn’t let you shut him out either

—Hwang In-ho

i feel like In-ho is a very observant partner so he’d probably notice your subtle changes in behaviour

he’d likely keep a closer watch on you after you tell him what you’re struggling with without you realizing it

might take drastic steps, like removing harmful objects, restricting certain things, or even making executive decisions for your well-being

he’ll try his best to reassure you, but his actions will show you he does care and ensures you feel safe and heard

seeing you suffer might remind him of his own past choices, leading to personal guilt

he will probably book you a therapist without asking, not meaning it in a bad way but tries his best to help you accustom to this

—Cho Sang-woo

with how much work he has, he’d most likely not notice as soon as In-ho or Jun-ho

once he finds out though he will want to discuss it and will be very straightforward

he’s worried for you, he cares and loves you dearly but he also tends to get frustrated easily which leads to a few arguments if you’re being stubborn on getting help

he’d try and keep his emotions in check, putting your well being first and realises that this situation isn’t very easy for you

that leads to him being way more gentle towards you, calming his emotions and thinking a lot more (even though he already does) before he speaks

will be very proud of any of your accomplishments and steps forward and loves your excited smile when you come from therapy, always listening without complaints with a smile

stays up at night to hear you talk if anything is on your mind, gently rubbing your back to ease your storm of a mind

—Kang Dae-ho

upon learning of your situation, Dae-ho would likely feel a strong urge to protect you from further harm and would be by your side 24/7

this sweet man would be so worried for you, he’d definitely suggest a good therapist he had in the past due to his own issues from the marines

he would keep an eye on you, ensuring you’re safe and intervening if he notices harmful behavior

might share his own challenges and coping strategies, showing you he understands this is a difficult time for you and that he’s here

it’d definitely shake him up that he didn’t notice sooner and that he wasn’t here to prevent all of this from happening, guilt and shame bubbling up in him

i definitely see him buying you a emotional support animal like a dog or whatever he finds that you’d love

would take you out on trips and walks if you’re feeling like it, showing you the world is a nice place and you have yet to see it all

—Kim Jun-hee

feels deep concern for you, prioritizing your well-being above all else

she would offer a compassionate ear, allowing you to express your feelings without judgment, reflecting her nurturing nature.

Jun-hee would provide comfort, possibly sharing her own vulnerabilities to create a safe space for you

understanding the gravity of sh, she might gently suggest seeking therapy or counseling, emphasizing that it’s a sign of strength to seek help

compliments you ten times more then usual, aiming to boost your self esteem and show you you’re truly a wonderful human being

might take steps to remove potential triggers from your surroundings and introduces calming activities to help you cope

she knows healing is a process and would remain patient, offering unwavering support throughout your journey no matter how long it may be

—Choi Su-bong

Su-bong had his own addictions in the past.. the fact he used to do drugs wasn’t unknown to you so his first reaction would be anger

why would you hurt yourself when you know how much it can fuck up your life? he was the perfect example of that so why?

he calmed down soon enough and understood he himself had his reasons, and probably so did you

he knew better than anyone how hard it was to break old habits. he’d be there for you, but he was broken too—so getting professional help was for the best

this situation might encourage him to reflect on his own past struggles and behaviour, leading to personal growth and a deeper understanding of your pain.

he’ll always be there to talk and listen— even though he seems childish and all that I think in private he’d be a completely different person you can depend on and tell your struggles to

he’d blame himself for your pain, no amount of you telling him it’s not his fault would change that

[fuck-customers]

I am a federal employee, and everyone I work with is so very stressed. The "Fork In the Road" email came, and it promised a paycheck till Sept if you quit. It also detailed how the "standards" were going to be "higher" here on out. One of these such "standards" was "loyalty", which is such a dog whistle.

I immediately got an email from my union saying it's a scare tactic and may not even be legal, and the pay may not be a garuntee. With food stamps and social security having payment issues, Im not trusting enough to take this "deffered leave". I know there were several people who already brought lawsuits against it, but I've heard there are people accepting it at my workplace. My work also paid off my student loans, and if I don't work here for 3 more years I have to pay my work back. I definitely don't have that kind of money.

The more immediate issue is how at each other's throats my coworkers have been. My manger is taking it out on our newest team members. The oldest team members are talking shit about her in our group chat. There was an update of a resource I use regularly and I was irrationally mad about it. Which is funny because it is more effective now, but the change is so grating right now.

To top it all off I had a medical scare resulting in a Spinal Tap. I took a week off to recover and now I'm having trouble getting back into the routine. After having the best annual rating I've ever had in Dec, I am now struggling to hit my quotas. January has been the longest year of my life.

Posted by admin Rodney

[tucsonhorse]

@notenderlaith has good points here about considering inequality, the effect it would have on the land and most marginalized people, and where the resources would come from. These are all very important factors that must be considered and weighed.

As someone who lives in the middle part of the country where we're too far to benefit from sea commerce, too vital resource lacking to claim our own industry, and whose town in fact was a boom town when the railroads were built, I say the rest is patronizing bullshit. Let me cover some of the specific points here. (This is not intended to be condescending, this is the easiest way for me to organize my thoughts and a bit sarcastic because the tone I got from your post feels extremely paternalistic to me)

"Most parts of the US are livable from the land itself when it is taken care of". This is true, especially with trading with neighbors. It also ignores the need/desire for material goods that are unavailable and cannot be created in all locations. Do you like cotton clothes? You better live in the south cause without long distance trade you won't be able to have them. Do you enjoy things constructed of wood? Better not live on the great plains cause there's very little wood there, definitely not enough to support the needs of a full community. Need healthcare? Better hope it's only basic stuff cause individual towns aren't going to have enough call for specialists for it to be worth training any.

Oh, but you say that people could still travel between places? You're right, but if we rely on cars and individual transport alone that's going to continue being extremely harmful to the environment. And you mention the concern for Indigenous people, the poor and others. It's good you're concerned, because they're the ones who are going to have the most trouble traveling between places by car alone. The people who use our current passenger train options, at least out here in the empty middle of the country, are the poorest among us. Because train travel is far more affordable for them.

"ultimately the whole reason those trains exist is the reason the poor communities exist in the first place. Greed." So you're saying that isolated, poor communities in the middle of the country didn't exist before the railroad? You're going to want to learn about the history of these places because for one the Indigenous people already lived out here (and the ones I know rather like having inexpensive and easy transport to other places when they want to go there) and for another, people wanted the land and the freedom promised. Not everyone wants to live in a city, and a whole lot of people lived in the center of the country before the railroads and were poor then too, not because someone was greedily keeping things from them but because it's just plain difficult to get things across that long a distance any way but railroads. So if the people living here, especially the poor people as you point out, want access to anything that cannot be made right in their town it's going to have to be transported long distance over land.

"America got out of the great depression through infrastructure building..." No, America got out of the great depression through WW2 and the massive changes it caused.

"reworking the rail system would be a further driving force of capitalistic greed" The thing is that the rail system as it is right now is *great* for the capitalists. It is constantly moving huge amounts of freight, especially fossil fuels like oil and coal, and doing it really damn well. Reworking the rail system to make it both more useful for passenger rail and primarily passenger rail would actually counteract that. Passenger rail is not lucrative. If it were there are lots of companies that would jump right on to developing it further. It is something that only makes sense as a project done for the good of the people at large.

What it comes down to is that you can say "we should" all you want, but our communities becoming more self sufficient is not going to happen easily and even if it does happen it won't be anywhere near soon enough to stem the damage being done by fossil fuels. And remember that "self sufficiency" is itself a very colonialist mindset.

Improving the current rail system to make it better for passenger rail, and yes expanding it, would be far less damaging than continuing to use gas powered cars to move people (and goods) through and to those same areas. You're right that the expansion would create jobs immediately, it would also create significant physical mobility for people. And people aren't going to just stop wanting that even if individual communities were to become perfectly self sufficient over night.

Your comments suggest to me that you likely live in a city, though I do not claim to know this for sure. Creating self sufficient communities would require significant changes in what labor is being done, primarily requiring many more farmers, which will likely be difficult seeing as the current number of farmers is rapidly dwindling because children don't want to take over and their parents are unable to farm any more. It also means a significant change in what food people eat and how we store it. If anyone in the north wants any fruit or vegetables, really any produce, from November (some years October) to maybe June those have to be imported from warmer climes or preserved from the previous growing season. The physical distribution of people would also need to be significantly altered in order to add people to the small towns that have as few as 5 (there's even some with just 1 but at that point I wouldn't even call it a town) up to 50-100 people and significantly decrease the size of cities. Small towns will need far more people in order to complete just the basic tasks required to feed and clothe the town year round, and cities wouldn't have nearly enough land within easy travel distance to support all the people living there.

All of these changes can probably be made, *if* millions of people can be convinced that they need to be made and the logistics are somehow coordinated. But in the meantime goods and people will need to be moved, which would be more energy efficient and eco friendly if done by train.

I don't have a problem with anarchist philosophy, though I do think it ignores some basic realities, and I am very definitely anti-capitalist. I also am very aware of the reality we live in and just how slowly any societal level change will happen. I do not think that people will ever be willing en masse to go back to living as "simple farmers" and I know that the current lifestyle of your average US resident cannot be maintained in self sufficient communities. So we need to focus on making the current lifestyle less toxic and harmful to ourselves and the earth, rather than refusing to accept any option that is not the perfect ideal of the end result we want, because if we will accept only perfect then we will never change from where we are now.

yankee train posters be like "we should electrify [network that specifically exists to transport the largest amount of imperial loot inland]". deeply concerning

Do you want to rip out every rail line on the North American continent, you do realize how damaging that would be for the environment, if the infrastructure already exists, we should use and improve it

[smatterbrained]

Hello so I really like your art style and the way you draw the transformers. And I was wondering if I could ask how did you learn how to draw them?

And do you have any tips for beginners?

Also read the fic btw and it’s genuinely one of the best things I’ve read. So keep up the good work and take breaks when you need too.

There're definitely ppl who can explain it better than me, like @bloominglegumes in this post here , but I here's a bit about how I approach it!

That's basically how I visualize it. It also helps to have reference when you're first starting out. Transformers are wacky to draw cause u need knowledge of organic and inorganic shapes and how they mesh. Personally I try not to let my guys look too stiff. I try to keep lines curved, even if they look straight on first inspection. Technically not realistic since they're made of metal, but it just looks better.

[spitblaze]

in retrospect my confusion on the whole 'man vs bear' thing may have been due to the fact that i was interpreting it as a 'would you rather be trapped in a mall with five black mambas or one adult gorilla' type question rather than a 'which is safer to begin with' question

[silkhy-john]

TTGFHs as an allegory for colonisers and their actions—almost ALL their actions—as an allegory for colonisation in its many facets?

“More likely than you’d think” doesn’t BEGIN to cover it.

[sysig]

Bitter breakup rivalry (Patreon)

[icewindandboringhorror]

Apparently I can meet my goal of roughly 400,000 words in 6 months if I just somehow write at least 2,200 words a day ghbjh... Almost 2,500 today... huzzah...

[neverendingford]

.

[someawkwardnerd]

just finished watching Scavengers Reign and am all kinds of stressed and fucked up please watch this show if you have the chance

[shrapnarl]

.

quick dreamsnso i can find them later

[bunnyboy-juice]

blah blah blah blah blah

[noblest-roman-of-them-all]

Some of y'all can't handle the concept of certain abuses existing in the first place, muchless a character who went through that abuse and is now showing realistic symptoms of said abuse.

"we need more traumatized characters/characters with ptsd and/or who are abuse victims portrayed realistically with symptoms that Arent cute and soft and pretty!" you guys couldnt even handle lapis lazuli

[vaspider]

Listen to me. Listen very carefully:

They are trying to wear you out.

They are trying to wear you out, and they own most major social media now, along with many major media outlets. The disinformation machine is cranking along. You are going to have to slow the fuck down and read things before you help them wear out other people, too.

So you just saw a post about a real scary bill, hunh? Republicans want to make it a capital offense to pet dogs and repeal The Sky Is Blue Act of 1793, declaring the new official color of the sky to be squant? Damn, that sounds scary.

Let's go look up this fictitious "Make The Sky Squant Again Act" on GovTracker* & on the official legislative tracker on congress.gov!

Well, let's see... GovTracker estimates it has a 1% chance of even getting out of committee and a 0% chance of being enacted, while congress.gov says this bill has 2 cosponsors who have been in the House and combined total of less than a month. The bill doesn't have any actual text, and it was referred to 5 different committees.

That fictitious bill and a hundred others like it are quite literally not worth your time, and more than that, continuing to wring your hands about it and tell other people about the scary scary squant sky bill only does their work for them. It scares people, it makes them spend time and energy on it, and it wears them out. It is a legislative Gish Gallop, meant to throw so many things at people that we can't keep up.

Even calling or messaging your Rep in this case means their staffer has to waste time responding to you and letting you know that Representative Buttzonheads definitely won't support making petting dogs a capital offense, a thing that will never, ever happen regardless.

Staying engaged in this environment is going to require protecting your heart and protecting your energy, yes, but also protecting the energy of others. This is why WWII propaganda posters also included ones taking people to task for spreading panicky rumors and undermining morale.

Do you know why most observant Jews don't eat chicken and dairy together, even though the ban is on red meat and dairy together bc you're not supposed to cook the calf in the milk of its mother?** It's not because we think that chicken might secretly lactate or Just Because. It's because the rabbis decided that if I'm sitting out in public and eating turkey and cheese together, someone might glance at the turkey and mistake it for red meat and think, "oh, well, I know that Spider is a good Jew, there must have been a change, or maybe I can just justify it to myself that if Spider does it, it must be permissible to bend the rules just that much." And I would then be accidentally leading my fellow Jew astray. We are responsible for being even more careful for the sake of others than we are for ourselves.

It's the same principle here. We need to really be careful about the information we are spreading and check things past reading a news site. Is it true? Is it relevant? Is it meaningful? Is the news site one I recognize? Can I find meaningful independent corroboration on another site, which is to say, if I find an article about it on a second site, is it just quoting or rephrasing this site?

Yeah, that is a lot. But that's how we keep them from using us to lead our fellows astray.

*GovTracker is an independent site. They explain their methodology in their About section.

**I cannot say enough how I am not at this time interested in going on a Jewish Side Quest About Dietary Laws on this post. Usually, I love it, but hold off this time, please, y'all. Let's stay on target this once.

[whispering-kavka]

the struggles of today proved to me that i might indeed be a little mentally unwell