#like student loans? got them

[dickgraysonmybeloved]

Thank the gods my family has money some times I need this vacation so bad

[navree]

Incorrect, the fact that Biden has dropped out and a candidate with history of supporting medicare for all and being more receptive to a ceasefire in the I/P conflict has made me go from "I cannot morally support the Democratic nominee" to "I am voting for the Democratic nominee despite the fact she isn't perfect in every respect." I'm really happy this played out. The Dems for the most part abandoned the old Obama platform and it feels like its possible an actual progressive agenda could come to pass in my lifetime.

Kamala 2024!

If you weren't going to vote Democratic in this election before Biden dropped out you're a dorkass loser who does not care about any of the issues you're yammering about here and also a fundamentally bad person, and I hope you get run over by a bus.

But you got one thing right in all of this gibberish, Kamala 2024.

[britneyshakespeare]

you know i'm also glad i was able to be a long-term sub for a para at the middle school for the last few weeks of the last school year bc once people's typical college semester ended, getting jobs in the sub management software fucking sucked. all these fuckin college kids popped outta nowhere and crept into every corner and everything was like you had to grab it as soon as possible, which is also just the worst bc like, summer is around the corner and that's 2 months where i don't get to earn that regular income.

and i have an odd resentment for the college kids who sub for that short gap between may and june and i dont know why. is it jealousy? is that a proper word for it? morally i know they are doing NOTHING wrong, and if anything they are doing good bc they're ACTUALLY WORKING!!!! like the sub shortages for the rest of the school year is fucking crazy. the few ppl who actually do show up to sub on a regular basis (AKA old retired teachers and me) get pulled in every which way and frequently don't even get a full half-hour break. i guess i just feel like, it must be nice for that job to be a convenient short-term thing for them. bc it's not, for me.

perhaps i feel some sort of pride in being useful and reliable at my shitty little unglamorous poorly-paid job in a public school district. perhaps i do. where were you college students in the dead of february right before the winter break week and peak flu season? huh? where were you? in your DORMITORIES? i bet. well i was here. in the hall

[saurons-optometrist]

Genuinely asking here, does anyone have any advice for me as a person trying desperately to break into the theatre industry, specifically in a stage management capacity (but at this point I'll take anything I'm physically capable of doing, which is pretty everything minus sound and costumes)? I'm trying my best to network and get my name out there but it's not working and I'm running out of savings. I have a degree from a good theater school, I have references that are regionally well-known and respected, I have a good resume, I have separate portfolios for the different areas I've worked in, I have tons of academic and student theater experience, I really don't know what the problem is. Is it that I'm not in NYC or LA but instead in a moderately sized city? Is it that I'm extremely clockable as trans? Is it just the lack of professional experience? I'm really banging my head against the wall trying to understand what's wrong with me

[strmpt]

update: finished all of my assignments on tuesday night. forever. im actually really done with school. i graduate on saturday omggggggggg

im so fucking burnt out. it will probably be a while before im like. okay again lmfao at least as far as drawing. i miss it but wowzers. i dont have it in me.

but anyway rrraaaaaahhhhhhh graduation rraaaaahhhhhhhhh

[askinnyblackman]

when will neoliberalism end. i'm tired

[here-there-were-dragons]

my mother is absolutely convinced of some nonsense conspiracy theory that (in her words) "originally humanity lived in peaceful all-woman societies of goddess worshippers who took care of eachother and lived in harmony, while males were roving loners that had no society and never cooperated. that changed when the men banded together and overthrew the peaceful woman-dominated societies, and enslaved us all." and, according to her, this is proof that a woman-dominated world would be innately more peaceful, and that men are innately violent and evil and should be either barred from holding any legal power or leadership roles or at least should be (again in her words) "gelded like bulls" to remove their testosterone before even being considered for such a thing.

she also evidently believes that the problem with all religions today is primarily that they aren't "goddess worshippers", because she seems to think goddess religions are inherently peaceful and pure too and seems to be especially obsessed with "Isis" in particular. the very very few times she's openly considered it unambiguously bad for some population or another to have been exterminated (she's got a bad case of devil's advocating genocide brain), she's gone out of her way to make up some crap about how said people were a peaceful society of goddess-worshippers, almost always of isis. delusions of isis-worship seem to be the only thing that ever causes her to consider any arab or middle-eastern culture, society, or ethnicity to be relatively uncomplicatedly undeserving of extermination, in fact, because every fucking time she doesn't immediately start devils-advocating it and making remarks about how "the rest of the world should box them in and let them blow eachother up" it's when she's whinging on about how whatever specific micro-ethnicity she's thinking about are or were traditional persecuted isis-worshippers.

the sole major exception to her weird fixation on isis worship justifying worthiness of life is the whole israel thing going on, in which she has consistently made very obvious that literally the only reason she's against the genocide of palestine is because it gives her an excuse to even more openly hate jewish people than she already did. and honestly i'm not sure even that's true because i think she's made some offhand remarks about palestinians having probably been peaceful isis worshipers before the jews infected them with christianity or something anyway.

so for the last, however fucking long it's been i've been constantly having to listen to her go off about how this behavior is in the jew's blood or whatever and that they literally invented all genocide because somehow the concept didn't exist before them and wouldn't have ever been invented by the rest of humanity without those jewish aliens dropping it in i fucking guess apparently and she furthermore goes on about how every single genocide and mass-oppression movement in history is directly inspired by them, ESPECIALLY the nazis, and THEN i have to listen to her rant about how, basically, wwii was something they entirely brought on themselves by "dominating the economy and treating everyone not them like shit" and the nazis were just "using their own tactics back at them". and then she goes on a rant about how the people the original jews exterminated back in the day (aka the first ever genocide, which they invented, because jews invented genocide and hate according to her) in the middle east region were peaceful matriarchal isis-worshipers.

and then she starts making comments about arabs being backwards and palestinians either being mysogynist muslims that should be boxed in to blow eachother up with everyone else or secret peaceful isis worshippers corrupted by men's cruel hand, sometimes in the same sentence, entirely dependent on which group she's more in the mood to hate at the time.

it's exhausting. beyond exhausting. her sole purpose in existence seems to be to have the singularly most exhausting set of politics physically possible to fit into one person.

just, sometimes i think, if there really is anything at all to the incredibly stupid and inexplicably popular idea that anyone or anything has a Purpose tm to exist for, i feel like my mother's purpose is to be walking proof to me of a Type Of Guy That Is Real, cause i sure as fuck would have trouble inventing this mess if it wasn't standing right in front of me spewing confusingly bipartisan hate. all of her thoughts and opinions are these long winding nonsense chains that feel like if that man carrying thing sketch about the friend with confusing politics was a person. on meth.

[arcane-vagabond]

.

[trashratofgarbagehill]

I find myself growing super frustrated with everything personal lately. Graduating doesn’t fix my burnout, I’m still struggling to recover from writing/editing a thesis for like 5+ hours a day for like 2 months. It’s hard to get back into personal projects when the thought of writing makes me angry, especially when my main WIP has given me writers block.

I’m hoping that this holiday break will be good for me. I feel happy for the most part but I keep trying to get back into what I feel born to do (create art) and it’s not working! Oh, well, no one ever said it’d be easy.

[awek-s]

serious question what laptop brands do you guys use

[hershelchocolate]

Girl HELPPP it is so impossible to try to find a place to sell digital art without every single recommendation being redbubble. I KNOW it's the easiest I know I know, I just really do not like the quality of things I've gotten from there and I've heard they've gotten worse with fees 😔 how is a girlie supposed to try to sell art like this?

[what-even-is-sleep]

Can’t wait for my drivers license to arrive so I can be driving legally again for the first time in 1.5 years!

[taviokapudding]

Fun fact

The US Supreme Court doesn't have any technical nor physical way to enforce their decisions

It's up to the majority of judges, attorneys, lawyers, and law professors in the US to decide if they agree with a decision

So I, someone who pays income taxes to keep their lights on and has the bare minimum to get a BA in law or teaching if I wanted, elect to ignore their ruling on discrimination and affirmative action because the first one was a falsified filing made by a Karen and the other was done by a student who's a Canadian citizen

Also I think background checks for all cases should be a requirement, not an optional decision the SCOTUS can vote on, moving forward.

All in favor for both propsitions, spread the word amongst your colleagues- I think we can all agree the masses are right in questioning their legitimacy and encouraging loopholes to work around both changes

[coffeebrownn]

preston and jeremiah are so cute! I noticed he looks younger in this ship compared tothe ship that he has with Nathan. I'm gonna guess is another Au?

YES!! AHH GLAD YOU NOTICE IT! yes they're in the slice of life au, but shit happened and this is why Jeremiah has "2" option of partner.

ok, some explanation, in the most simplest way, here's a chart!

[shadesofmauve]

I want to step away from the art-vs-artist side of the Gaiman issue for a bit, and talk about, well, the rest of it. Because those emotions you're feeling would be the same without the art; the art just adds another layer.

Source: I worked with a guy who turned out to be heavily involved in an international, multi-state sex-slavery/trafficking ring.

He was really nice.

Yeah.

It hits like a dumptruck of shit. You don't feel stable in your world anymore. How could someone you interacted with, liked, also be a truly horrible person? How could your judgement be that bad? How can real people, not stylized cartoon bogeymen, be actually doing this shit?

You have to sit with the fact that you couldn't, or probably couldn't, have known. You should have no guilt as part of this horror — but guilt is almost certainly part of that mess you're feeling, because our brains do this associative thing, and somehow "I liked [the version of] the guy [that I knew]", or his creations, becomes "I made a horrible mistake and should feel guilty."

You didn't, loves, you didn't.

We're human, and we can only go by the information we have. And the information we have is only the smallest glimpse into someone else's life.

I didn't work closely with the guy I knew at work, but we chatted. He wasn't just nice; he was one of the only people outside my tiny department who seemed genuinely nice in a workplace that was rapidly becoming incredibly toxic. He loaned me a bike trainer. Occasionally he'd see me at the bus stop and give me a lift home.

Yup. I was a young woman in my twenties and rode in this guy's car. More than once.

When I tell this story that part usually makes people gasp. "You must feel so scared about what could have happened to you!" "You're so lucky nothing happened!"

No, that's not how it worked. I was never in danger. This guy targeted Korean women with little-to-no English who were coerced and powerless. A white, fluent, US citizen coworker wasn't a potential victim. I got to be a person, not prey.

Y'know that little warning bell that goes off, when you're around someone who might be a danger to you? That animal sense that says "Something is off here, watch out"?

Yeah, that doesn't ping if the preferred prey isn't around.

That's what rattled me the most about this. I liked to think of myself as willing to stand up for people with less power than me. I worked with Japanese exchange students in college and put myself bodily between them and creeps, and I sure as hell got that little alarm when some asian-schoolgirl fetishist schmoozed on them. But we were all there.

I had to learn that the alarm won't go off when the hunter isn't hunting. That it's not the solid indicator I might've thought it was. That sometimes this is what the privilege of not being prey does; it completely masks your ability to detect the horrors that are going on.

A lot of people point out that 'people like that' have amazing charisma and ability to lie and manipulate, and that's true. Anyone who's gotten away with this shit for decades is going to be way smoother than the pathetic little hangers-on I dealt with in university. But it's not just that. I seriously, deeply believe that he saw me as a person, and he did not extend personhood to his victims. We didn't have a fake coworker relationship. We had a real one. And just like I don't know the ins-and-outs of most of my coworkers lives, I had no idea that what he did on his down time was perpetrate horrors.

I know this is getting off the topic, but it's so very important. Especially as a message to cis guys: please understand that you won't recognize a creep the way you might think you will. If you're not the preferred prey, the hind-brain alarm won't go off. You have to listen to victims, not your gut feeling that the person seems perfectly nice and normal. It doesn't mean there's never a false accusation, but face the fact that it's usually real, and you don't have enough information to say otherwise.

So, yeah. It fucking sucks. Writing about this twists my insides into tense knots, and it was almost a decade ago. I was never in danger. No one I knew was hurt!

Just countless, powerless women, horrifically abused by someone who was nice to me.

You don't trust your own judgement quite the same way, after. And as utterly shitty as it is, as twisted up and unstead-in-the-world as I felt the day I found out — I don't actually think that's a bad thing.

I think we all need to question our own judgement. It makes us better people.

I don't see villains around every corner just because I knew one, once. But I do own the fact that I can't know, really know, about anyone except those closest to me. They have their own full lives. They'll go from the pinnacles of kindness to the depths of depravity — and I won't know.

It's not a failing. It's just being human. Something to remember before you slap labels on people, before you condemn them or idolize them. Think about how much you can't know, and how flawed our judgement always is.

Grieve for victims, and the feeling of betrayal. But maybe let yourself off the hook, and be a bit slower to skewer others on it.

[veganhamsalad]

Idk guys I won’t upend my life but if he doesn’t hear me out on this idk what I’ll do