#paid for by our taxes of course

[running-with-kn1ves]

Hi! What do you think would happen if there was a disease that turned people into yanderes and the reader is immune? So she’s the only sane one, which everyone around her falls in love (romantically and platonically) and turns obsessive?

Hrmm I'd like to take a different approach to this than the original *yandere apocolypse* of which I was thinking. Just wrote down some odd thoughts for this one!

Perhaps two thirds of the world has been inflicted with this specific disease-- making this new population become violent, deranged and utterly--obsessively, in love.

There's the beginning stages of violence and death of course, causing a great chunk of the world to go mad as some yanderes who must share a darling cannot do so. Celebrities, idols, and your local barista who's friends with everyone in town, are constantly in a tug of war battle between their yanderes.

But life seems to somewhat settle down. Everyone still functions as they would in society-- going to the bank and paying their taxes, remaining at their 9 to 5 jobs. But there are far more murders, laws are no longer followed; the daytime has become just as dangerous as the night.

Our dear reader, a cashier for a chain grocery store, has so blessedly not been affected by this newfound disease. They know their residence in a large city and with a social job would not leave them unharmed by this new change to the world. So, they begin to attend support groups for 'darlings,' the victims and (mostly) sane population that has been left. At first the other victims were people they had never seen before, seemingly innocent and normal people who just wanted to go on with their lives. They all seemed to lead a much harder living, with their unending stalkers and vicious pursuers that made them sob for hours as everyone else listened to their woes.

Reader had yet to be targeted, of which offers them a sliver of relief-- until they fear perhaps they have been affected by the disease. But their life continues, without any impulse or desire to snatch anyone up, and without any stalkers or murderers on their trail. Life is almost, weirdly, normal.

They don't watch the news anymore, they go home before it gets dark, and refuse to take any extra shifts with anyone who's been affected by the outbreak. They continue to go to the meetings, out of solidarity and precaution in case they begin to hear footsteps behind them when walking from home or find eyes peeping behind their curtains. However, the support group seemed to have slowly begun to change. Its regular members were beginning to dwindle, less and less showing up regularly. And, there seemed to be an addition of.... hostility, amongst the newer members.

The support group "leader", a man who has thrown reader off since day one, seemed to be far more invested in hearing their experiences with these "attackers" as he called them. As was everyone else, of which were slowly becoming vaguely familiar faces. Not familiar enough to mention it, but to the point where it was beginning to get eerie.

It wasn't until they went to their next shift for work, did they realize why everyone seemed so odd. Customer after customer came up, all purchasing odds and ends that could be suspicious if one paid close enough attention. But all that reader could focus on, was how the eyes of each person seemed to linger upon them, taking notice of their loose work shirt and unkempt hair. It was a common sound to hear heavy breathing from the other side of the counter, odd compliments on how beautiful their eyes were, or deafening silence from customers that didn't utter a word but stared in complete captivity. The next support group meeting, those nameless faces seemed to be far more recognizable. At this point, the original members of which reader had originally met, were nowehere to be found. All that remained, were the uncomfortably familiar customers, and the oddly charismatic leader.

Every eye seemed to be on them, each waiting for them to speak on their experience. But despite the creepy, lustful gazes and hateful glares at one another, there was some form of supportiveness that came from the group. They gave reassuring pats and squeezes, some getting a little handsier than others.

There were a few that reader recognized more than others: the silent, dark haired man that came to their register everyday, the businesswoman who always seemed to loosen her scowl once she saw them, and the couple who seemed a tad more than "friendly." Out of all of them though, reader felt the most reassurance from the group leader-- the man who seemed to dote on them like a parent would, though there was still fear over his constantly nagging questions and downward stare behind his glasses.

It was once reader decided to stop showing up to the increasingly more recent group sessions, did things start to turn sideways. There would constantly be a knock at the door, asking why they weren't there, if something was wrong, if a stalker had gotten to them. But it wasnt until recently did they feel they were being watched, followed, stalked.

Things started to go missing, from their favorite pair of underwear to little knickknacks kept on their desk. Reader had never felt the effects of the disease and its victims, but ever since the uncomfortable shift in the support group, life hadn't been the same.

One fateful afternoon, there came another series of knocks. Reader couldn't take it anymore, and had long given up on answering the door. The knocking continued, however. Thered be a pause, a moment of hesitation, before the pounding began again. Muffled voices could be heard outside readers front door, and suddenly there grew a great fear in their chest.

Not long after, the knocking seemed to occur in other areas around the house. The backdoor echoed as glass was banged on, the windows of their bedroom seemingly pressured by fists that begged to be let in. Their name was called from outside, small and booming voices all begging to be let in, promising that they were only there to help.

Reader covered their ears, crawling under the blankets and rocking themselves to the hope that the noise would go away. And eventually, It did-- only to be replaced with the sound of shattering glass and rushed footsteps.

[decolonize-the-left]

GENERAL STRIKE TIME BABEY. READ THE WHOLE POST.

While we're all mad at government sending money to Israel that police budgets are so inflated because of how often they pay settlements.

And also that it's a verified fact that our police train with Israeli soldiers. Remember when they were black bagging people in PDX? It reminded me of this ex-Israeli soldier talking about how they'd do the same thing to innocent Palestinians just to terrorize them and their neighbors. It was intentional terrorism when they did it.

Police budgets pay for all that.

Correction, we pay.

To put it more bluntly,

We pay for them to kill and terrorize people.

Just as our taxes pay for the deaths of Black and Brown people all over the world from Turtle Island to Sudan and Palestine.

In Dec. 2022, Louisville Metro Government agreed to pay Walker $2 million to settle lawsuits against the city. Metro government previously paid a $12 million settlement to Taylor’s family in Sept. 2020

We paid for Breonna Taylor's death.

And her murderers were never arrested btw. Not that there aren't still people trying to arrest them of course. But our money paid for their lawyers and wouldn't you know it, no charges have stuck.

Four years to the day after Breonna Taylor’s death, federal prosecutors are moving forward with a re-trial of one of the officers involved in the botched raid that ended her life. At a status conference Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings scheduled Brett Hankison’s final pre-trial hearing for September 13th. His re-trial is scheduled to begin on Oct. 15. In November of last year, Hankinson was tried for violating the Constitutional rights of Breonna Taylor, her boyfriend, and three neighbors when he fired through two covered windows during the raid. Prosecutors argued he used excessive force when he shot into the apartment complex blindly. Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, had fired at officers executing the search, claiming he thought they were intruders.

And Myles Cosgrove?

Yeah we're paying him to terrorize more people. He got a job as a fucking sheriff's deputy.

Myles Cosgrove, the former Louisville police officer, who was fired for fatally shooting Breonna Taylor in a botched 2020 police raid and hired earlier this year as a sheriff’s deputy in Carroll County, rammed a resident’s truck with his cruiser Monday and then pointed a gun at the owner and several bystanders, witnesses said.

Witnesses told The Courier Journal that Cosgrove barreled into Happy Hollow Private Resort Park trailer park at a high rate of speed without his emergency lights on, then struck William Joshua Short’s pickup truck with such force that it sent the vehicle flying into a building, breaking off two cinder blocks.

And Johnathan Mattingly wrote a fucking book about it to make money off of his role in her murder. $15 on Amazon.

He also wanted to sue Kenneth Walker, Breonna's boyfriend. You know why? For damages and injuries he sustained while killing Breonna Taylor.

WE PAID FOR ALL THAT. ALL OF IT.

Our power is in our dollar.

American politics and officials don't care for our lives. It's why they're content to watch us protest for months. Because we're still going to work. We are the worker ants simply fulfilling our duty, receiving the bare minimum to survive for our labor.

We're still building their bombs. Paying our taxes, so much that hardly any of us could afford more than rent.

We are just drones fulfilling our purpose to the upper class who doesn't give a shit about us beyond what we do for them and how little we will do it for.

If we want change we're gonna have to stop working. We're going to have to deprive them of products they sell, of our taxes, of our low cost labor.

And the strike that UAW is planning in May 2028 has inspired a lot of others to start looking at the opportunity to join in.

If you haven't heard of it yet, a strike is when workers organize and stop showing up for work. And a general strike is a mass strike across various industries around similar demands or bargaining positions.

There have been multiple calls for a general strike since then, predominantly from individuals and groups on social media, which has often resulted in confusion about what a general strike would actually look like. To be clear, a general strike is not a protest or a rally, a single picket line, or a boycott. It is, as I’ve previously defined, “a labor action in which a significant number of workers from a number of different industries who comprise a majority of the total labor force within a particular city, region, or country come together to take collective action.”

Throughout history, workers have used this tactic as a nuclear option to shut down entire cities when needed, including Philadelphia in 1835, Seattle in 1919, and beyond.[...]

If even four or five of the unions representing the workers mentioned above banded together in a nationwide general strike, the entire country would grind to a halt. When Shawn Fain asks his fellow unions to set the timer for May 2028, what he’s really saying is, get ready to shut sh*t down and level the playing field between bosses and workers once and for all.

JOIN A UNION. AND TALK ABOUT THIS.

And make one of the demands out to be an end of American support to countries participating in apartheid and genocide.

End the taxes for police budgets and settlements. If they want police departments so bad then they should FIND funding for themselves like the government makes USPS do.

One of the biggest pushbacks we hear is that there is never any official backing for calls to a general strike. Well here it is! Make sure you tell EVERYONE

This could be a global strike if other countries choose to participate on the same date

No, I don't think Palestine has 3 years so in the mean time join a union, keep protesting, start rioting, answer Every call to action coming from a Palestine and Sudan and the DRC and sign this strike card

[robertreich]

Socialism Fear-mongering is Bananas 

Don't get scared. I'm going to talk about something that’s caused a lot of fear mongering.

You see, advanced countries, like the United States, pool resources for the common good. How? Well, governments enact taxes and then spend that money on things that benefit everyone. Think of national defense, schools, highways, healthcare, unemployment insurance — basically government spending that protects the well-being of the people.

But since some folk, like your conservative Uncle Bob, think ANY pooling of resources for the common good is…socialism.

And since socialism is apparently so terrifying…

I'm going to use a different word to describe this taxing of individuals for the common good.  Let’s use.. I don't know.. How about…Banana! That's not scary, right? 

Great. So, there are essentially three purposes for which governments banana.

First, social insurance against the possibilities of misfortune and neediness, such as unemployment, poor health, disability, and so on.

Second, public goods that we all benefit from, such as parks, highways, public health, and national defense.

Third, public investment in our future, such as basic research, education, and efforts to address pollution and the climate crisis.

Whether we’re talking about Sweden, Spain, or Slovenia or the United States — all countries in capitalist economies banana to benefit the common good.

And bananing is how societies grow their economies, become more prosperous, and ensure a better life for their people.

It’s also how countries aid people in hard times — or when emergencies arise, like a global pandemic.

To simply call any government banana’ing “socialism...”  Oops, sorry I used the word.…Well it distorts our ability to think through how we banana and what we banana on.

And, it ignores the fact that the United States bananas LESS than most developed nations.

We’re among the worst when it comes to bananaing to reduce poverty, especially child poverty.

And pandemic aside, we banana less on unemployment insurance than nearly every other country.

Of course these countries generally have higher taxes than the United States to support all their bananing.

But they get more in return — better jobless benefits, better health care outcomes, debt-free education, more support for child care and elder care, and more generous retirement benefits.

And we could banana a lot more without having to raise taxes on middle or low-income Americans if the rich paid their fair share. Unfortunately, the tax code in the U.S. has been rigged so that the rich and powerful often skirt what they owe and get away with lower tax rates than regular people.

And the rich have done such a good job convincing people that any increase in banana’ing would be… you know, that S word ... that we just accept things as they are.

The only banana’ing they don’t seem to mind is on the military, where we banana more than the countries with the next 10 biggest militaries combined. That’s bananas!

All of this is a major reason why America has such staggering levels of inequality and poverty.

Whether bananing is “socialism” or not is a useless argument. Every country bananas. Capitalism requires banana’ing to ensure a degree of fairness and stability.  

So the next time your Uncle Bob decries any pooling of private resources for the common good — or bananaing — as “socialism”... share this video with him.  

And give him a banana.

[saintmeghanmarkle]

Comment in the Standard: How dare Montecito millionaire Prince Harry demand our tax money to cover his legal costs

This subject matter cannot be covered too much for my taste.

Emphasis and comments by me:

Prince Harry’s latest court defeat in his rightly unsuccessful bid to overturn the decision to refuse him guaranteed Met police protection after he pulled out of royal duties might seem like a trivial battle over legal fees.

But in fact the duke’s failed attempt to pass 50 to 60 per cent of the costs incurred by the Home Office in fighting his unmerited claim tells us much about the preening prince and his selfish disregard for virtually anyone other than himself, his equally self-obsessed wife, Meghan Markle, and his children. [No one else matters of course. It is all about them.]

That’s because when the Duke of Sussex, as he still wants to be called despite ditching his royal role, wasted yet more of the High Court’s time in arguing for the taxpayer to fund at least half of the hundreds of thousands of pounds that the Home Office was forced to spend on the case, what he was really doing was trying to pass on a large chunk of the bill to ordinary taxpayers. [Sponging off others is quite on brand.

That’s right: instead of having the decency to accept that he’d have to pay up when he lost, the Montecito multimillionaire, for whom the legal expenses will be loose change, wanted taxes paid by everyone ranging from people on the minimum wage to bus drivers, cleaners and pensioners to cover his costs. It’s frankly contemptible. [Does he think it is his birthright to have the peasants pay for his temper tantrums?]

It's notable too that yesterday’s costs order by the High Court judge, Sir Peter Lane, reveals that Harry, who is so protective of his own privacy (when it suits him), managed to breach a confidentiality agreement made as part of the litigation by emailing “certain information” that was meant to be secret to one his lawyers and the MP Johnny Mercer. The prince might have apologised for the error, but the costs order refers to the “seriousness of the breach” and it was at best a sloppy mistake that added to the Home Office costs that he was trying to avoid. [What were you up to Harold?]

Harry’s whole case was, of course, misconceived from the start and it’s worth recapping why.

He asserted that the decision in 2020 by security experts on the Government’s Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures, known as Ravec, that he should no longer receive publicly-funded police protection in Britain because of his move abroad should be overturned.

The supposed reasons were that the committee had allegedly failed to take into account the impact of a successful attack on the prince and had also acted unreasonably, unfairly and with a lack of transparency.

It was nonsense for the prince to think that he knew better than a panel of experts informed by the latest security advice from the police and intelligence agencies. [This man has a very high opinion of himself.] The High Court unsurprisingly dismissed Harry’s claim on all grounds, finding that there was no reason to overturn the Ravec panel’s decision. It had in fact left open the possibility of occasional police protection for the prince when in Britain, if there was evidence in future of a sufficient threat to his safety.

An attempt by the prince to persuade the courts that a later offer by him to pay for police protection should have been accepted was also rebuffed. Yet another judge dragged into Harry’s interminable litigation ruled it would be wrong to allow the wealthy to receive a service from the limited pool of specialist Met protection officers that a less affluent person could not afford.

That too was the correct and inevitable decision. Police protection officers are highly skilled specialists, trained at significant public expense, who exist only in restricted numbers and who are required to safeguard those facing the highest risks such as working royals, Cabinet ministers and prime ministers current and former, not others like Harry wanting the comfort blanket of protection they don’t need.

In short, every argument put forward by Harry was flawed and rejected by the courts. It’s a sign of his delusion that even the succession of earlier rebuffs from the judiciary didn’t stop him basing his attempt to get off a big chunk of the Home Office’s costs in fighting the litigation on the fantasy claim that he’d achieved “partial success” in his legal action. [He learns nothing from his experiences.]

Maybe that was how Harry viewed it. After he all, he told the world in his biography Spare that “there's just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts”.

But it simply wasn’t true, as yesterday’s High Court costs order reminded him.

It pointed out that Harry had “comprehensively lost” and that there was “no merit” in his claim of partial victory with his judicial review argument failing “on all of the pleaded grounds.” [Harold is a big loser.]

It was the obvious outcome from the start and the claim should never have been brought. His inevitable defeat was deserved and now it’s time for the penny-pinching prince to pay up.

👉 How dare Montecito millionaire Prince Harry demand our tax money to cover his legal costs | Evening Standard (archive.ph)

post link

author: Von_und_zu_

submitted: April 17, 2024 at 10:53AM via SaintMeghanMarkle on Reddit

disclaimer: all views + opinions expressed by the author of this post, as well as any comments and reblogs, are solely the author's own; they do not necessarily reflect the views of the administrator of this Tumblr blog. For entertainment only.

[ageingfangirl2]

Let Me Help You Idiot! Hajime Kokonoi (Tokyo Revengers)

You met Koko when you were younger, and he took you under his wing. As an inspiring designer, you loved to make him nice clothes. As you get older, you want to be more independent, but Koko will always look out for you. Kokonoi x Reader (Bonten Timeline)

From the moment you were born, you had to fight tooth and claw to survive. Your dad left when you were three, leaving you and your mum with nothing. Your mum went back to being a hostess, meaning you were left alone in the single-room apartment you had. She was good at her job, earning lots of money and expensive gifts from suitors. But she had addictions and spent the money on drugs. From a young age, you had to fend for yourself and learn to survive, from clothing and making meals to keeping the apartment clean and ensuring mum put enough money aside for bills. Luckily, the neighbours took pity on you and helped pay for your school things, and one lady taught you how to sew, saying it would help you in the future to have a skill to pay the bills. You kept up your sewing throughout school, getting better and managing to sell some of your wares at a local market on the weekend.

This is where you met Hajime Kokonoi, and you took pride when he complimented the intricate details you embellished your clothes with. He decided you were going to be his personal designer in the future, and he was going to help you make a name for yourself.

PRESENT DAY

Koko kept his promise to help you, using his money and connections to get you into a good design school. All he asked in retum was you make all his clothes custom and free of charge, and of course you said yes because it was the least you could do. By now, he was on executive in Bonten, a criminal organisation and he liked to look nice because he had an image to maintain.

After working for a couple of designers, you saved enough to open your own shop in Tokyo, and it felt nice to pay with your our money instead of Koko's. Bonten kept Koko busy, so you didn't like bothering him unless he called you. You had one big problem, you had no real clue about money and expenses of running a business. And now you had to pay taxes on top of that, which went over your head. You chose to focus on commissions to make more money and filled in all the forms to the best of your abilities. Little did you know it would come back to bite you in the ass.

KOKO

I was busy dealing with the financial mess Sanzu had left for me after his last mission.

'I'm surrounded by idiots,' I groan, rubbing my temples.

'Err boss, I have the reports you asked for,' some lacky who's name I didn't deem important to lean stutters, standing in the doorway of my office. Even though y/n had paid for their shop and was getting quite a few comissions, I liked to keep an eye on them. They were a year younger than me and had become like a younger sibling I felt protective over. When we met up, we didn't talk about money, and I knew if they had a problem, they would come to me for help. However, my eyes widened, seeing the financial report in front of me.

'What the hell?' I gasp.

How could they be so careless when it came to finance? Firstly, they were paying way too much rent for the area, and secondly, the government wasn't happy with their taxes, which they had underpaid. They were close to losing their shop and facing a big penalty from the government who thought they were committing fraud.

I grabbed my jacket and car keys, needing to see them before the problem got out of hand. I run out of my office, ignoring Sanzu, having bigger fish to fry.

The light was still on in the shop when I pulled up outside. They liked to work late if they had a deadline. I enter the shop and the bell pings. I lock the door behind me and turn the open sign to closed.

'Hi, how can I help you - Koko, what are you doing here?' y/n stares at me, tilting their head to the side in confusion.

I walk over to the counter and put the file down in front of them, 'if you didn't understand, why didn't you ask me to explain?'

They open it, and the colour drains from their face, 'am I in big trouble? I thought I'd look dumb if I had to keep asking you to help me!'

I sigh loudly, 'yeah, well, you look pretty dumb right now, so that didn't work out for you.'

They look down at their feet and shuffle nervously, 'the last time we had coffee, you were stressed dealing with your colleagues' finances. I didn't want to give you any more stress, so I did what the internet told me to do filling out the forms. I'm sorry Koko. What do I do now?'

I walk and the counter and pull them into my arms. I didn't like to show emotion in front of the other executives, but y/n was the exception. I needed to protect them.

I kiss the top of their head, 'in the future don't take any extra comissions after you've submitted your taxes for the financial year until the new one starts or the govenment will think you're committing fraud. I'll get this sorted for you, and remember you can come to me whenever you need help.'

They squeeze me tightly, 'I'll never be able to pay you back, Koko. Sorry for being an idiot.'

I snort, you're the only idiot I can stand.'

Not wanting them to stress anymore, I'd also handle the rent problem for them, no one messed with the people close to me.

[the-owl-house-takes]

I absolutely hate the argument that Luz can be excused for her actions and people have no right to dislike her just because she’s neurodivergent. I struggled immensely in school both academically and socially in large to my own “neurodivergence”-can I just say I hate that word-but I was never so stupid as to think about bringing live animals and fireworks inside my school. The fact that Luz, the 14-year-old daughter of a veterinarian, saw a bunch of living, breathing animals and thought-‘yeah, I’m gonna use those as props! My book report is gonna be so cool! I surely can’t just use rubber snakes!’ Which probably why they were so damn aggressive! Because snakes only really bite and attack when they’re threatened, or stressed, or pissed off! Which really does not paint Luz as being a very caring or thoughtful person!

“But that’s the point! She needs to get better and she does!”-No she absolutely fucking does not. Instead of realizing that she can’t just run away and live in fantasy-land, the show again and again reaffirms that Luz can do no wrong, everybody else never should’ve felt angry about her reckless idiocy-because that’s what it is, idiocy-she gets to live out her little fantasy world and do whatever she wants. The way the show acts like the principal giving the summer camp pamphlet was some horrible evil thing, how could anyone do that? B I T CH LUZ IS FUCKING LUCKY that she weren’t expelled or arrested! She brought EXPLOSIVES WITH THE INTENT OF SETTING THEM OFF INSIDE A SCHOOL BUILDING. In an area of mass shoring fears and schools prohibiting anything can looks like or emulates(even if it is just a foam sword or something), Luz really should’ve just taken two seconds to think to at least leave the fireworks. Course at 14 I would think that a person who have the common sense for that to never be a thought.

And no, “neurodivergence” is not an excuse. It pains me when characters in media doing stupid shit and senseless(especially when it gets on the audience’s nerves) gets pinned on having autism or ADHD like it makes it okay, and that the character can’t be blamed or held accountable for it. Why do people hold those with these conditions to such low standards? When this happens, it feels like people are saying, “Yeah, this could’ve easily caused grievous bodily harm or death but they’ve got anxiety and autism, so we can’t be mad, they couldn’t possibly know better because they’re simply not on our level, they’re too stupid to understand!” Hell no. Stop giving excuses! The “I’m literally neurodivergent and a minor” attitude does not work in court!

And maybe if they understood this and actually challenged Luz on being very episodic on learning her lessons and that she did in fact run away to avoid consequences of her actions and reality won’t bend to her interests and she can’t treat everything like it’s a fanfiction instead of beating the dead horse with another dead horse about how Luz ““““helped”””” Belos when all she did was teach him one glyph and got used as bait by someone who she KNOWS tricked her. By that logic Lilith is just as responsible for Belos meeting the Collector as Luz is. Yeah she’s 14 but did it really have to stretch through the entirety of season 3?

Because season 3 is where I officially knew that Luz hadn’t learned a thing. The way the show frames the art teacher giving Luz the side eye like it’s wrong for her to distrust the kid who used the art supplies-that she probably paid out of pocket for-to infest the school with spiders and snakes and then would’ve blown it up if she hadn’t gotten sent to the principal’s office is so out of pocket. She has every right to view Luz with suspicion! People don’t tend to like others who make a mess in their areas with their stuff, shocker. I’ve already said a bit about the summer camp thing, but seriously, a summer camp that teaches teens about mortgages, how to manage a bank account and checkbook, do taxes, etc is literally the best thing Luz could’ve gotten out of that situation. She would’ve learned something many people complain wasn’t taught to them at a young age AND would’ve met people who she could easily befriended. Yeah, it’s boring and Luz probably would’ve checked out of the situation but it’s better than juvie! Also boring stuff is apart of life, it’s part of the way we can live the way we do because everything is easier said than done. Also with Camila, it’s a dumb retcon to have her not understand anime or Luz’s interests in Season 1 and 2 but a secret nerd who just got put down by the man in season 3. Like, Camila had to make a change with Luz, because 14 is not far from 18, and if Luz did do something stupid that ended up being a crime, she could very well be charged as an adult.

Then the whole ‘I just wanna be understood!’ Luz, honey, you’ve been surrounded by people who understand you and don’t get mad when you mess up, even if it’s spectacularly. Your girlfriend literally immediately told you she essentially wanted to spend the rest of her life by your side right after you got revealed as a liar which you promised you wouldn’t do anymore. Your best buds have always been on your side even when you’ve gone behind their backs. Your mom was sending you to that camp bc she had too, even though she originally believed it would expose you to kids with similar interests that could be befriended. And again, her hands were tied, because you were being reckless to the point of danger. But oh wait, it’s all okay now because you’re ‘understood’.

Not finding that happy balance where you can express yourself but not act like an idiot or endanger yourself and others, just some vague ‘understanding’ by an anonymous ‘them’. Do you mean everyone, all the time has to understand you the way Camila, Eda, King, Willow, Gus, Amity and Hunter do? Because that’s not how real life works.

And this isn’t a character hate-though I do hate the way Luz was finished-this is on the writers for not going through with the themes of Fantasy Vs. Reality they had going that could’ve taught Luz that balance and management; which in my personal opinion, would’ve been a better arc for a person with ADHD.

-

[y-rhywbeth2]

OK, so good news(?); either the temple is so dilapidated that it isn't worth taxing (considering its in a part of the city that's so old the modern city is built on top of it: fair) or else Durge will be going to jail for tax evasion... Oh dear, it looks like it's time for the apocalypse! What a shame that will interfere with the court date!

Also they seem to expect the bank to still be standing once they're done razing the city and they are a fucking terrible employer:

Player: "Fine. I'll open an account." Head Clerk Meadhoney: "Splendid! New coin and customers always welcome. We need only settle the matter of Waukeen's Wage." Player: "I've recently come into a large estate. Could I sign it against that as a guarantee instead?" Head Clerk Meadhoney: "Naturally. We serve the Gate's oldest families - not all have cash in hand. What kind of establishment would we be if we saw value in coin alone? Could you provide the address of your property?" Player: "It's in the Undercity." Head Clerk Meadhoney: "Oh, by the Coinmaiden! How, er, quaint. And the name of the manor?" Player: "Erm, the Bhaal Temple." Head Clerk Meadhoney: "Is that B-H-A-A-L or B-A-L-L?" Player: "Bhaal. As in, the Lord of Murder." Head Clerk Meadhoney: "Silly me - of course! Let me check our records..." Head Clerk Meadhoney: "I'm afraid your estate is not registered on the Sword Coast customs censuses - have you been paying your mansion taxes? Or perhaps it isn't valued highly enough to be above the threshold." Player: "It is an illustrious household. We employ paid help!" Narrator: *You wonder how many years ago it was you last gave Sceleritas so much as a table scrap of your dinner, let alone any paycoin.*

Hey, he's a fiend! He has no biological needs to pay for, and I dread to think what he'd spend money on.

And more of Durge being a hilariously entitled brat:

Player: "The indignity! I'm heir to one of the oldest families in this city!" Head Clerk Meadhoney: "Then why not bring the gold for the account? Father not given out your allowance yet?"

Good question!

BHAAL. WHERE THE FUCK IS MY POCKET MONEY.

That said, I don't think Bhaal has ever had estate in the city whose existence he predates and I don't think that they have any claim on the Anchev's stuff (assuming they weren't nouveau-riche). Then again, the temple is technically Bhaal's house, has been there forever, and as a god he does outrank the nobility, so... they're kind of right?

"I am a god and an honorary Patriar, you peasants."

Player: "Fool! I will soon hold the treasures of the world over, as all tremble in stricken awe." Head Clerk Meadhoney: "Do come back when you do!"

[fayrobertsuk]

Poetry for ALL

Some personal anecdotes and a plea follow...

As quite a few of you know, I’ve been engaged in disability awareness and rights campaigning and other work since sometime in the 90s, so when I was given an opportunity to support and host an event dedicated to making performance poetry as accessible as possible in 2018, I jumped on it.

(image description in alt text)

Poetry for All is the brainchild (and heartchild, and soulchild) of Rose Drew, who I first met through one of Richard Tyrone Jones’s Utter events in London. She’s an extraordinary writer and performer, and a powerhouse of an events host and organiser. Within about 30 seconds of watching her on stage, I knew I wanted to be like her when I grew up as an artist. When she got in touch three years later to ask if I’d like to help out with what turned out to be the inaugural event, I threw myself into providing as much support as possible with enthusiastic abandon, and we pulled together a line-up which included the extraordinary performers Raymond Antrobus and DL Williams (“DeafFirefly”), both of whom I’d performed with before and was keen to see again. 

Now, there’s a whole section on our new website about the history of the events where you can read the facts, but I want to say here that, personally, that first event in March 2018 (coincidentally on my birthday!) was an absolute eye-opener – seeing how poetry events could expand and develop the ideal of accessibility in ways I hadn’t considered. It was also extremely inspirational as I realised that, well, I was allowed to write about my disabilities. Seeing and hearing artist after artist sharing so much and so eloquently unlocked something in me that I didn’t even know I’d been repressing:

I’m allowed to be an openly disabled poet. I’m allowed to express my neurodivergence. I can tell my truth. 😱🤯

Bit of a culture-shock, but I owe so much to the poets and to Rose (and to Dave Wycherley, BSL interpreter extraordinaire – that’s a hard and physically/ mentally taxing job as it is, but to do that with poetry? on the fly?! breathtaking...) for helping me get to that starting point, knocking down the walls of my own internalised ableism.

So, apart from a paean to self-expression and why representation and finding tribe matters, and a screed of gratitude for new friends made and old friendships strengthened through the course of these events, why am I writing this? What’s with the hashtag? “Plea...?”

Well, so far, since you ask, all of our events have had local funding in York, where they’ve taken place exclusively so far. Rose applied for Arts Council England funding for this and next year for a tour comprising several venues and a host more disabled artists and BSL interpreters from various parts of the UK (all getting paid properly!), but we found out last week that we’d not got the money. Any of it. So our forthcoming event on 24th November in the gorgeous National Centre for Early Music is in jeopardy and, since the thought of Rose (herself a disabled artist on low wages) having to pay for this out of her own pocket was not to be supported, I threw myself at a plan of creating a (somewhat last-minute) Crowdfunder, so that we can at least pay for the venue, the artists’ and interpreters’ fees, the travel and accommodation expenses of those of us coming from out of town, and the costs of producing merchandise to sell. We’ll be producing an anthology in print and ebook form, as a joint publication between indie publishers Stairwell Books and Allographic Press. And, if we exceed our funding goal, there’ll be video and audio available of the event to boot!

We’ve created a frankly very exciting range of pledge rewards for people wanting to support us (all the way from £1 and £2 options, since money is tight, especially for disabled folk, right now, to more chunky ones like private mentoring, workshops, and a publishing package), and we’ve got three weeks(!) to raise our £1,500 to cover the shortfall from ticket and merch sales. Eeep! So, if you’re able to and would like to help us, we’d be ever so grateful. The campaign is here:

https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/poetry-for-all-2023-fundraiser

And if you have absolutely no funds to share with us at all, we’d be incredibly grateful if you shared on social media, with friends, on blogs, all of that!

Thanks for reading all this, and have a great day!

[sissa-arrows]

Journalist: Rima Hassan called for an uprising.

Politician: An uprising means being outraged, revolted. Of course I’m outraged and revolted by what’s happening in Gaza?

Journalist: Rima Hassan is a French Palestinian. Uprising in Arabic means Intifada. So you’re calling for an intifada?

Source

1: Just because Rima is Palestinian we suddenly have to translate her tweets in Arabic to grasp at straws and try to find a hidden meaning? That’s called racism.

2: I’m laughing so hard because they are so racist that calling for an uprising is okay but calling for an intifada is not. Like if you say it in French it’s okay but in Arabic it’s violent and illegitimate. Even the pro Palestinian French politician (a white man) refused to answer that yeah he was calling for an intifada because it’s the same fucking thing but in Arabic and was like “she used the word in French for what it means in French you’re being ridiculous”

3: This was on a public network paid for by our taxes so if you’re French you can make a report at the ARCOM here by the way you can fill a report even when it’s not a public network.

[thatbadadvice]

Help! My Girlfriend Bought Me A Million Dollar House And Raised My Kids And All I Got Was This Million Dollar House And Someone To Raise My Kids, When Is It Finally Going To Be My Turn To Get A Break??????

Pay Dirt, Slate, 17 April 2023:

Dear Pay Dirt, My longterm girlfriend and I disagree about whether a $30,000 inheritance left to her by her great-aunt should be “her” money or “our” money. She wants to spend a large part (almost a third!) of it on expensive supplies for her hobby. I think that we should save most of it and use some of it on a vacation since we both find traveling extremely romantic. My argument is: 1) I don’t care about her hobby, but we’ll both enjoy a trip abroad; 2) we’ve lived on only my (admittedly low, since it’s academia) income for over a decade, so according to her own rule about entitlement to “her” windfall, shouldn’t she technically have been entitled to none of my wages all these years? Her argument is: 1) she had to put aside her hobby for many years to raise our children (it’s not a safe art form for young kids to be around) and yearns to return to it; 2) she paid entirely in cash for our $950k house at the beginning of our partnership (though my income pays the property taxes and maintenance costs), therefore she alleges that we haven’t actually been living on solely my income because I’ve been saving on rent all these years. I feel resentful of the double standard about control over finances and hurt that she would rather prioritize her own joy over our shared joy. She feels impatient to reconnect with her hobby and hurt that her contributions to our lifestyle are unseen. How do we reconcile our different viewpoints? How should the money be allocated? Is there something that we’re missing? —I’m About to Glass(Blow) a Fuse

Dear About to (Glass)Blow a Fuse,

I hope you don't mind that I corrected your very clever parenthetical sign-off! You're understandably dealing with a lot of hurt right now at the hands of the cruel and self-absorbed girlfriend who bought you a million-dollar home and abandoned her beloved hobby to raise your children, so I totally get why a brilliant, overworked, and under-appreciated academic genius such as yourself would fuck up something so incredibly simple and obvious, you poor thing. Really speaks to the distress you're in as the victim of this woman's sordid scheme to steal every ounce of joy from your life by experiencing some of her own after decades of managing your household for you for free.

Great relationships are built on the exactly equal division of all resources, and it sounds like your girlfriend has trouble grasping this because she seems to believe that the home you live in and the time she has invested raising your children for you have value, when of course they do not. The only thing that has value in this world is cash money, which is why we call it money. If parenting were valuable, you'd be able to trade it on the stock market! And what was your girlfriend going to do, not live in a house? These are things she'd have done with her life anyway, and they don't get to count toward her contribution to the household just because she did them for and with you instead of expressly and specifically pursuing her art. Whereas who knows what you could have done with your life if you hadn't been locked into a free house and a partner dedicating herself full-time to keeping your children alive for you?

Now, after all these years of being nothing but a worthless freeloader whom you support out of the generous goodness of your kind heart, your girlfriend has finally acquired something of value, and she wants to keep an entire third of it for herself? To do something that doesn't directly benefit, enrich, or entertain you personally? That's not equity, and it's certainly no way to repay you for periodically writing checks to the plumber. Isn't it about time you finally got something out of all of this for your trouble?

What benefit is there for you in having a partner who enjoys the sweet satisfaction of creative fulfillment after years of yearning to express herself? What kind of weirdo wants their girlfriend to have her own interests? And what kind of ungrateful hussy doesn't jump to spend thousands of her own money on a romantic vacation with someone who actively resents even entertaining the possibility of the idea of her doing something that makes her artistic spirit sing?

The balance sheet of this relationship is indeed all out of whack, and it's too bad that it's taken this long for your girlfriend to see just how uneven your bargain has been. If we're going to get technical about what has "value" in a relationship — and it does seem like your girlfriend is an inveterate bean-counter in the worst way around this stuff — the best way to reconcile your mutual account, as it were, is to present your girlfriend with an itemized bill for all the services you have provided her over the years, such as allowing her to buy you a home, permitting her to forego a wage-earning career, and gifting her with the opportunity to abandon her favorite hobby. That should pretty swiftly put everything you're "missing" in stark relief, and solve the question of how she should allocate her money in the future.

[fiercynn]

on otw's $2.5 million budget surplus: for fuck's sake do something with our money

the recent ddos attack on ao3 illustrated that the otw (@transformativeworks) has amazing volunteers who were able to get things up and running again after a cyberattack. and i’ve seen a bunch of different people urging others to donate to otw in light of the attack.

the problem? not only are the volunteers not going to get any of the money, but the otw likely isn’t going to do anything else with it, because they already have more than $2.5 million in budget surplus that they have not been transparent about with their members, and that they have no plans for.

yup. we’ve known for years that otw had at least $1 million in their “reserves”; they’ve said so at their last two public finance meetings in 2021 and 2022. but a few months ago, @manogirl and i went digging a little deeper because we suspected that there was even more. 

and we were right. from the documentation available, our estimate is that at the beginning of 2023, they had $2,585,841 that was not dedicated to any purpose. this does not include money they had budgeted to spend in 2023 on regular expenses. just extra. (keep reading to see how we got that figure.)

equally appalling? they have all this money and are barely earning any interest on it. satsuma on dreamwidth looked at their 2021 tax returns and found that only ~$10k of their money is held in an interest-bearing savings account, which resulted in them earning only $90 in interest income for 2021. the rest of it is not in interest-bearing accounts. it is just sitting there.

looking at all the crises and dysfunction that have been discussed and uncovered over the past few months - racist harassment and the three-year-old promise to hire a diversity consultant; the mistreatment of volunteers by the otw board both related to last year’s CSEM attacks, and, separately, mistreatment and racism towards chinese and chinese diaspora volunteers both in the past and recently with the closure of the otw’s weibo account; and of course, this latest ddos attack - all of this indicates that there is severe dysfunction within the org. and donors throwing more money at the organization clearly isn’t helping.

the otw board needs to get its shit together and hire people to help with these things. this is not a new idea - there’s been talk for years about hiring paid staff, and in fact, at their july 2021 board meeting, otw said they would be appointing a volunteer who would be known as the “paid staff officer”, to come up with a plan for hiring paid staff. (to be clear, the “paid staff officer” would be an unpaid volunteer.) it’s been two years since that commitment. they have not, to my knowledge, appointed that officer yet.

it’s infuriating, because otw’s “scrappiness” as an organization is constantly used to defend their obstruction of action on things like racism, and this ddos attack will be used to further that agenda as well. but otw doesn’t need to be scrappy. they are well-resourced and could be using that money to set up more sustainable systems, instead of burning out and mistreating their volunteers, and reneging on commitments to address racism and harassment.

at the very least, if they’re not going to do anything with their massive budget surplus, they should stop taking more of people’s money. but we’d rather they did something useful with it.

if you want to see this change, the otw finance commitee holds a public meeting where you can ask questions and give them feedback. last year it was in mid-october. you do not have to be an otw member to attend. i'll definitely be making noise about it once the date is announced, but you can also follow otw's socials.

one brief aside: at the time of posting, a lot of these links are not working because the otw's website is still down. i copied these links from a twitter thread i made in the past and they should all be correct, so you just may have to wait until the site is back up to look at them.

now, to debunk some common excuses that people (not otw representatives, mind you, but just people on the internet who have decided to defend the org) give when confronted with how much money otw has:

MYTH: otw needs to keep $2.5 million in cash reserves in case of an emergency or unexpected revenue shortfall. REALITY: it’s true that nonprofits do need SOME cash reserves for those cases. typical practice is to have 3-6 months’ worth of operating expenses. otw’s current operating expenses are ~$520,000/year, so 6 months would be $260,000. (and, in fact, when i was told by an otw finance committee member that they had $1 million, they were intending 25% of that to be for emergencies, around $250,000). if you were being REALLY cautious, you could have reserves up to one to two years. but $2.5 million is enough for almost FIVE YEARS OF OPERATING EXPENSES. that is an absurd amount to be hoarding, especially when otw’s history of fundraising is that they always exceed their goals, and always make more money in donations than they need for their expenses within a given year. MYTH: they need this money for legal costs if they get sued. REALITY: otw gets most of their legal expenses donated, which is also not listed in their budget, but is in their audited financial statements. in 2021, the most recent financial statement we have, you can see on page 10 that they received just over $230k in donated legal expenses. they do budget some minor legal expenses yearly: in 2023 they’ve budgeted a little over $5k for “registration fees for conferences and hearings and funds set aside for legal filings if necessary, as well as an allocated share of newly adopted OTW-wide productivity tools”. however they do not have a history of even spending that much: in 2022, they had budgeted $4k for legal expenses and only spent $244 (see cell C29 of the budget spreadsheet). they have never been sued, and they do not appear to budget for litigation costs. and when, in the past, they’ve been asked about what their reserves are for (back in fall 2022 when the finance committee told me they had $1 million in reserves, even though this was patently false given their tax documents for 2021), litigation costs were not brought up.  MYTH: they just haven’t had enough time to figure out investment options. REALITY: they clearly have at least one savings account set up to generate interest, which only has $10k in it. even if they haven’t figured out a full investment portfolio, why wouldn’t they put more money in that account? in the u.s., the federal deposit insurance corporation (FDIC) insures bank accounts up to $250,000, so they should have at least that much in there. absurd. also, they have had plenty of time even for a larger portfolio. if you search “investment” on their site, you’ll see that they’ve been talking for YEARS about investing their reserves. more specifically, at both their 2021 and 2022 finance meetings, they said that they needed more time to research investment options. as usual, they have had far more time than they need.  MYTH: they need this money for new servers. REALITY: otw does in fact include expenses for new servers and server maintenance in their yearly budget reports. you can see this in their 2023 budget spreadsheet if you go to the sheet “program expenses” - under “archive of our own”, you’ll see server expenses. the $2.5 million is money that is EXTRA to their listed expenses and revenue in that spreadsheet.

finally, see below where we’ve given more context on otw’s budgeting and showed our work in coming up with these numbers.

showing our work

firstly, i should note for the record that i sent a message to the otw finance committee through the contact us form on the otw website on may 11, 2023 to ask them to state the amount in their reserves.

it has been two months and i have still not received a response (which i find funny, because at the last otw board meeting in early july, the board specifically said to use that form to contact the finance commitee if we had questions about the 2023 budget), so @manogirl and i were forced to do our own math. we've had this work checked by a number of people, but of course we were only able to work with the information the otw has made publicly available.

a few things you need to know about the otw’s budgeting:

they release yearly budget reports on their website (here’s their most recent one, which shows what they project for 2023 and their “actuals” for 2022), but they do not include their surplus in this report - they only include the revenue and expenses for each year

they also provide both their yearly audited financial statements and their yearly tax returns (form 990s) on their reports & governing documents page, but currently, the most recent statements we have are from 2021

otw typically raises more money in donations than they need within a year, so their surplus is always growing 

they have used the term “reserves” in the past to talk about money, but we don’t know exactly what they mean by “reserves” - is there a dedicated account that they consider their reserves?

because of these uncertainties, the goal for @manogirl and i was was to figure out how much of a budget surplus OTW had at the beginning of 2023, and because we don’t know how they define “reserves”, we defined it as how much they had in liquid assets that were not being dedicated for a specific purpose in their budget. (liquid assets are anything that can be converted into cash quickly – e.g. not equipment like their servers, nor anything that would be held in a long-term investment account, etc)

the first document we looked at was their 2021 audited financial statement. the key number is on page 11, under the section on liquidity, where it lists their end-of-year liquid assets as $2,315,841.

so at the end of 2021, they had over $2.3 million in liquid assets.

but since their 2022 audited financial statement isn’t up, we had to turn to their 2023 budget, and specifically, to their 2023 budget spreadsheet, where they show the “actuals” (what they actually raised & spent in each line item) for 2022 in column C. as i mentioned, they don’t list their reserves in this spreadsheet - only the revenue generated & expenses paid within that year, not anything carrying over from the previous year unless clearly outlined.

so at the bottom you’ll see that their net income (revenue minus expenses) in 2022 was $493,564.94, and that they then transferred $400,000 of that to the reserves sometime in 2022.

and the remaining $93,564.94, their adjusted net income for 2022, presumably carries over to help pay initial expenses in 2023 before they started earning more revenue. they also transferred $130,000 of their reserves BACK to help with that at the start of 2023.

so now we have the numbers we need to calculate the surplus (including reserves) at the start of 2023:

$2,315,841 (liquid assets at end of 2021) + $400,000 (transferred to reserve in 2022) - $130,000 (transferred from reserve in 2023) = $2,585,841 USD at the start of 2023

so that’s our math. otw had $2.5 million at the beginning of this year in surplus, in addition to around $223k (last year’s $93.5k in income and the $130k they transferred back from the reserves at the beginning 2023) to fund their expenses for the first half of this year. this does not even include the hundreds of thousands they raised in april 2023 during their fundraising drive.

okay the main part of our documentation is done, but if you want to read a little bit more about what @manogirl and i learned from doing this deep dive, here are a few additional thoughts/nuggets:

first of all, OTW is incorporated in the u.s. state of delaware, which is interesting because as @manogirl researched, delaware is a tax haven where 501c3 nonprofits don’t have to pay any business tax. plus, in many u.s. states, nonprofits have a limit on the amount of money they can keep without spending, but this too is not the case in delaware. of course, incorporating in delaware to take advantage of those benefits is not illegal! but it is very savvy, a characteristic that seems to have not continued with their financial management past their original incorporation lol

next, some more detail on their finances from their 2023 budget spreadsheet. let’s start with revenue.

the most interesting thing to me here is that while their spring and fall membership drive donations bring in the most, non-drive donations are also substantial. also their “total unrestricted net revenue received” is $975,638.36 in cell C16. however, for some reason, when they calculate their net income for the year, they use cell 12, “total unrestricted revenue” ($1,012,543.42) instead. the difference between those two cells is that cell 12 is the amount before their transaction fees are subtracted. but i have no idea why the transaction fees would be ignored when calculating their net income. is this an error?

next, their expenses, which came out to $518,978.48. not too much surprised me here except how low their legal advocacy spending still is, plus  the fact that they’d given francesca coppa a grant for her book on the history of fanvidding, lol. (i’ve written more about this; so has wistfuljane on dreamwidth if you scroll down a bit from here).

it’s also interesting to look at what they’ve budgeted (both the revenue & expenses they’ve expected going into the year) for 2022. in every revenue category, they have exceeded their goal, except for $50 in “other income”. and in most of their expenses categories they have overestimated their needs, except for going over about $700 in the transformative works & cultures, & about $500 for development. this just shows how much they are able to meet their yearly expenses (overestimated) with the revenue generated each year (underestimated), & still have substantial amounts left over (almost half of revenue transferred to reserves)

so that’s what we’ve found. if anyone else notices weird things in their budgeting, please let us know!

[nyahchis]

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐧𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞 - kento nanami ☆‎‎‎‎  © vnsux

🌲 it's late, but you just can't sleep, so kento decides he'd stay up with you, just this once, because you deserve it. 0.69k [ prompt list ] [ day one ] [ day three ]

🌲 cw. reader degrades themself, reader is gn, no pronouns are used, implied marraige

the sounds of your muffled sniffles filled the empty room, and aside from the crackle-pop of the fireplace, it was the only noise in the whole house. you didn’t want to worry kento today. you always worried kento. well, more like he was always worried about you, but you just seemed to think it was all your fault.

you stare into the burning flames of the fireplace in front of you, the usually comforting hot air not doing its job. you sigh, and wipe your tears from your flushed cheeks, stressed. you had been thinking a lot, about how kento was always the one who paid the bills, and how you felt useless, and how you didn’t know what you were going to do with your life, but you never said a word to kento–you were worried if you did, he’d be more worried than he already is.

or, you were being selfish. but either way, kento was already making his way into the room, slipping a shirt over his messy hair. you liked when his hair was messy, it was cute. sometimes you preferred cute kento over ‘my shift ends in an hour’ kento.

“ken…” you whisper. “did i wake you up?” he shakes his head, making a beeline for the kitchen to pour himself, and you, a cup of warm coffee. he made sure to do it just the way you liked it. but the truth is, you did wake him up, and he was scared. 

you mean the world to kento, and i mean everything. opening his eyes to see you weren’t there was equivalent to four heart attacks. you were so important, he’d risk his life for you. but he wouldn’t ever tell you it’s your fault.

“you just scared me a little, don’t worry about it, hun.” he said reassuringly, finding a seat next to you in front of the fireplace. you tried to wipe your tears before he could see them, but your eyes always got so annoyingly red, and your cheeks would always be stained with the salty liquid. he noticed anyway.

he places both mugs of coffee to the side, on the bricks, and takes your face in his hands gently. “were you crying?” he asks, so gentle, just like he always was. you shook your head, but he didn’t buy it. “you can talk to me, darling, what’s the matter?”

“i feel bad, ken…” you mutter, leaning helplessly into his hands. “i feel like…i don’t contribute, and you do everything for me, and…and i feel useless.” you tell him, the tears bubbling back in your eyes. so pathetic, so stupid. how did you end up with someone like kento? 

“of course you contribute, y/n, what do you mean?” he furrowed his eyebrows, putting one of his hands on your head and picking up his coffee with the other. he took a slow sip. “you do so much, sometimes i think i don’t deserve you.”

you look away, ashamed. “i don’t do anything, kento, not even a crumb of taxes, i don’t go shopping, you do all of it!” you nearly shout, and he shushes you gently. 

“y/n, it’s okay. i know you don’t have a job, i make a lot of money, i don’t mind, sweetheart. it’s part of our relationship.” you shake your head again, hiding your face in your hands. 

“i feel so gross. its gross, ken. how do i not have a job!” you sob. he had no idea you felt like this. you felt gross? he hated that. he pries your face from your hands and presses his forehead to yours, unruly blonde hair crossing yours, and places a chaste kiss to your nose.

“do you really feel that bad, honey?” you nod. he sighs. “do you want your coffee? we can figure this out. together. i can’t have my baby all upset on me, makes me feel bad.”

you look up at him, nodding slowly.

he smiles at you, so loving, his cheeks making his eyes crinkle, and you just can’t help but smile back, after all, kento always made you feel better. always.

🌲 author's note. gotta love husband kento. nanami is so dad coded oml i wish i had a man like him. anyway, here is day twooooo!! namami fit this theme a lot, i think, especially because i see him as the type of guy that would be great at comforting people <3

[sgiandubh]

Pecunia non olet

When the Roman emperor Vespasian reinstated Nero's very unpopular tax on the distribution of urinals' waste, sometime around 70 AD, his son and heir, Titus, complained about it, thinking it was vile and disingenuous. Vespasian shoved a golden coin under his nose and asked the young fool if he still felt offended about it. Pecunia non olet - money doesn't smell, son. This very gold comes from, well, urine. Live with it.

I once comforted a whole orphanage, in Moulmein, Burma, for three weeks, with about 500 well-spent US dollars, at the local bazaar and shops. From rice to fruits to the strange, exuberant vegetables of the Tropics, meat and eggs and chocolate, and for good measure, aspirin, band-aid, antiseptic wipes, notebooks, pencils, socks, shoes, Tshirts, skirts and trousers. Filled three rickshaws with all the boxes and bags and went for it. The St Joseph orphanage was run by five formidable Anglo-Indian nuns, who took care of about 40 children, aged 5 to 16, whose parents died in the horrendous floods that followed the Nargis cyclone, in 2008. They had nothing. When they asked me who I was, I honestly told them it did not matter. Non nobis, Domine, non nobis.

Make no mistake. I am not a saint. I smoke like a chimney and swear like a drunken sailor and sometimes have to professionally, elegantly lie, because such is the nature of my job. I am cynical and short-tempered and yes, less impatient now than at 20. That day in Moulmein will always shine bright in my mind and in my heart for its absurd joy. And also for the feeling the real generosity was not mine, that day, but theirs.

Last week-end, about 200 women I would probably find perfectly insufferable paid from 2000 to 5000 US dollars each, to meet and greet and fawn and take #silly pictures with three guys who happen to be part of the cast of a certain TV series. With only one of them, in reality, but let's not trouble the waters. Apparently, they had a good time. I am not sure about the guy: he's not exactly the Svengali type. I very much doubt that this event will go down in history. It was as good as it gets, with the people it could attract. Entitled? Maybe. Sad? A bit, if you ask me. But above and beyond all of this, it was transactional. I pay, you drop by. I pay, you take a pic and smile. I pay, I ask a stupid question. I pay, we have a dram. For our mutual benefit.

I have no idea if these people maxed out their credit cards to be there. In theory, this is all about disposable income, cash that can and will be well... disposed of, somehow, whether it's a horrendous pair of mauve shoes or the last gadget or hey, a meet and greet. If I were Marie Kondo, I'd even dare say that parting with cash brought them joy.

Can we compare the two moments? Of course not. But both of them are the result of a (hopefully fully aware) choice.

It's been a long while I also chose to never set foot in such places, for such things. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

Stating the opposite is pure hypocrisy and pearl-clutching.

Sunset on the Salween River. Moulmein. Burma. August 2010. Taken by me.

[prismatic-bell]

SO YOU WANT TO HELP THE RAILWAY WORKERS: A CHECKLIST

If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's a news article.

This is a shitty, shitty situation, and unfortunately we're in a position where all we can do is make it less shitty. BUT. WE HAVE THE POWER TO DO THAT.

Grab that phone and your unlimited data plan, because we're about to flood some phone lines, babes. Start by texting "Sign PZPAKG" to 50409 to sign the action letter written by Resistbot. Once you've done that, reblog this post (if I see more likes than reblogs on this post I'm gonna shit lead) because there are links in here and Tumblr search will eat it, and this will only work if we get a ton of eyeballs on it.

First, you'll want this link, which lists all 100 State Senators. (If you live in Massachussetts or Rhode Island, skip down to "Ready to do more?" Don't call your Senators yet.) Yes, I'm aware this webpage looks like it was made in 2006, I'm extremely sorry (your tax dollars at work), but you do what you gotta. You're going to start by looking up the Senators from your state. This site will direct you to their official webpages. Look for "locations," not "contact," because most of them use email contact forms as a first line of contact these days. You want phone numbers. You should find at least two--one in Washington, DC and one in your state's capitol. (Some may have more than one in-state. I know here in AZ Kelly and Sinema have both a Phoenix and Tucscon office, and Kelly also has one on the Navajo Nation.)

Pick one, it doesn't matter which. Call it. You may get either a staffer or a voicemail. (If it's voicemail, listen carefully to the prompts. If it says voicemail is full, go back and try the other phone number.) Staffers are pretty friendly, but can occasionally seem a little disconnected or brusque. If that's the case, it is not you--your call's probably been routed through a switchboard and they're experiencing lag. Don't worry about it, just say your bit.

HERE IS THE SCRIPT I USED THIS MORNING: "My name is [legal name] and I'm a constituent of Senator [name]'s from [my town]. I'm calling in support of the railway unions in light of this frankly extremely bad deal they're being asked to accept. If railway workers are so important to our economy that Congress can get involved, then they're important enough to deserve paid sick time. I'd like to encourage the Senator to vote NO on any bill that doesn't provide railway union workers with at least seven days of paid sick time."

Total time elapsed for me doing this: about five minutes.

OKAY. READY TO DO MORE? Some Senators have already signed an open letter saying they're in support of providing sick time to railway union members. Those Senators are Bernie Sanders from Vermont, Kirsten Gillibrand from New York, Tammy Baldwin from Wisconsin, Cory Booker from New Jersey, Sherrod Brown from Ohio, Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts, Jeff Merkley from Oregon, Alex Padilla from Callifornia, and Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island. Give them a call next. HERE'S THE SCRIPT I'VE BEEN USING: "My name is [legal name]. I'm actually an Arizona resident, but I wanted to thank Senator [name] for supporting sick time for railway union members. I was really disappointed to hear President Biden basically decided to get involved in union-busting and I'm glad to hear the Senator is on labor's side. Please encourage them to stay the course and get that sick leave pushed through." If you're from Massachusetts or Rhode Island, feel free to say something about how you're glad your state is standing up for labor when you're calling your own Senators on that list. You can say that to any Senator on this list if they happen to be yours, obviously, it's just definitely got even more of an impact if you're already a constituent.

OKAY. WANT TO KEEP GOING?

I've got one more assignment for you. This is the list of committee members for the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. There are ten of them and some of them overlap with phone calls you've already made, so you're almost done. If you look at the script below and then look at the committee members and go "you think Republicans give a shit about this?," I am begging you to at least call Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney. Yes, the majority of the Republican Party is a nuclear trashfire. Yes, they're Republicans. But if you said "Nina, you have to go to dinner with six Senate members and three of them have to be Republicans," my picks would be Murkowski, Romney, and Liz Cheney. We might actually be able to make a dent in Murkowski and Romney if we try hard enough, and yes, "try" is important here. Fuck Yoda and his do-or-do-not bullshit, if activists in this country only went for sure things we'd still have chattel slavery and no votes for women. YOU GOTTA GET UP AND TRY.

SO HERE'S YOUR SCRIPT FOR THE COMMITTEE MEMBERS.

"My name is [name]. I'm calling because Senator [name] is a member of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. I'd like to encourage him/her as a Committee member to lead by example in this current situation with the railway unions, and vote NO on any bill that does not provide railway workers with at least seven days of paid sick leave. I'm sure Senator [name]'s position on this committee has given them plenty of examples to know a healthy and organized labor force is far better for our economy than a sick and demoralized one."

GO BLOW UP THE PHONE LINES LIKE YOU'RE GUY FAWKES UNDER PARLIAMENT. The railway workers have had our backs all through Covid. It's high time we had theirs.

[aristotels]

I would love to hear an extended rant about being an artist in a periphery country, if you're willing to say more.

sorry for this being late! but yes there are quite a few things to this.

1) EDUCATION/JOB OFFERINGS

when you are from a periphery country, the art education accessible to you is much worse than in the imperial core. yes, i know, you dont need to go to art school, you can be self-taught, you dont need a degree, but art school is about making potential job connections. in a country like croatia, you do not have access to those connections. you do not have ability to go out, show your portfolio, get reccommended by a professor for a listing. the education is stunted as well - the animation program here is atrocious, my building had an attic with dead pigeon corpses littering the room, there are no drawing tablets, computers are old, the building is leaking, but the lack of ability to make professional connections is the main concern.

also, your degree? people hear you got a degree from a balkans land and you are immediately less worthy in their eyes. your name, which is not anglo? crossed out, despite your skills. job offerings within your country? good luck, everyone lives in poverty, you are underpaid, and studios hiring can be named on fingers of one hand. you are left with earning online.

and you are left with earning illegally. making author contracts with pdv, taxes, etc is incredibly complicated when working over upwork, doing commissions etc. this does constitute as black market. we do not hand in our taxes like in the usa, theyre deducted from our salaries and contracts immediately. this means you are missing out on potential grants and statuses which require you to provide papers of your commissions. it also means that transfering money over paypal has to go into small amounts to your own account, to avoid suspicious activity.

2) ART TOOLS ACCESIBILITY

a thing that is very frustrating. living in a periphery country? good luck getting anything. art shops are scarce. art shops do not carry the same amounts of items, and they are more expensive than in their mother countries. you are left with office supply stores. the quality of accessible paints and other tools is lower. its already been proven that products shipped to eastern europe are of lower quality and higher price than in the west; and this goes for paints too.

this means that, if you do traditional art of any kind, you are left with shopping online. this includes shipping - youre in a periphery country? congrats, often it does not ship to it, or the shipping is atrocious. your choices? mostly deutschland amazon - every item has 10€ shipping minimum. prices are not adjusted to your salary, they are adjusted to the german ones, which are much higher. i have to regularly order fillings for my brushpen. it is not available in my country. the price on amazon is significantly higher than on pentel website, and their usa based shipping. yes, just the price of the product. pentel does not ship this to my country btw. aliexpress is what you have, it takes 2 months to arrive, is frequently lost in mail, and even with it being cheaper - its still a bit more expensive than the original.

3) ALGORITHM, SOCIAL MEDIA

this is the third thing - algorithm works against you if you are not from the imperial core. of course, there are timezones, but also - your posts tend to be shown to people who live around you; meaning you have harder time breaking into the international market, and that market is the only viable one.

4) BEING PAID LESS

being eastern european (or asian or southern american or african or...) gets you lower salary. i indeed love my employers, i adore the comic i work on so much that its become my own project as well, theyve been nothing but kind to me - but the fact remains that i, as an eastern european, am and will always be paid much less than my usamerican counterparts.

5) JOB OPPORTUNITIES, ONCE AGAIN, ENGLISH LANGUAGE

adding this but: its hard to break into cartoon network/adult swim/etc without being presently there. you cannot get to conventions, you cannot have your portfolio checked, and you must speak english. yes. anglos take english-speaking for granted, and fail to realize that actually speaking english for us is not a privilege, its a necessity, and its a tool of imperialism. it is unfair that you cannot do ANYTHING without speaking english. you cannot get jobs, you cannot advance your career, and while i personally speak english quite well, not everyone does, not everyone should have to.

anyway sorry for the length

[butchmiles]

Sorry for the early morning rant but ugh we had a rough night last night. Our dishwasher has been broken for quite some time with no communication from the property on when it’ll be fixed or replaced. We’ve had to make time to hand wash dishes on top of us both working 9 hour shifts everyday and our usual daily chores of (vacuuming, taking out the trash, wiping down surfaces with bleach, steam mopping the floors, and up until last night doing laundry). Last night our laundry washer not only crapped out and stopped going through it’s cleaning cycles it also backed up with what looks and smells like sewage water. The smell is so strong it’s making Dean’s existing nasal infection (brought on by the unaddressed mold and ventilation issues in the apartment) even worse. They’re so hoarse they can barely be heard after being up all night coughing. We are at our wits end right now.

We went through the application process for a new apartment that lasted for about 3 months of back and forth. We managed to raise enough money to pay the insane fees to apply to the apartment which were $300 for the applications, administrative fee, and holding fee and and the $1,810 deposit for the guarantor company we had to apply with because we couldn’t raise enough to pay down our credit debt accounts in time. The apartment approved us based on the proof of income given and then radio silence until we happened to check the apartments website and notice the apartment we had paid to apply to and reserve was back on the market. We called them to get an explanation since nothing was communicated to us after the approval. After basically dragging it out of them over the course of another week of back and forth the property manager explained that corporate decided to revoke our approval because Dean works through a staffing agency so they couldn’t take Deans income as valid. An insane concept all things considered. Money is money.

So there we were fully packed and no longer with anywhere to go.

Our lease end was fast approaching and we had no other option but to extend the lease here from the end date of November 2023 to the end date of February 2024 and try to pay off the $11,210 in collections that was dragging our scores down to the point that no apartment would approve our application despite a near perfect rental history (no evictions, lease violations, or even complaints) and at the times of applying perfectly qualifiable and verifiable income based on the 3X rent rule.

Our plan is to try to pay $1,868/month towards this total of debt collections in order to have them cleared and letters of payment available to apply for an apartment that checks every single box we were looking for in a new place. The minimum score requirement for this apartment is 599. We are both about 50 points from that as of today.

Currently our non negotiable expenses per month are as listed

Rent $1,680 (this will increase to $3,025.99 starting November 18th)

Renters insurance $30.50 (required according to the lease. A lapse in coverage results in fees charged by property)

Phone bill $350 (mine, Dean’s work and personal, and my disabled MIL lines)

Light bill $110 (this is with budget billing in place)

Pet insurance $40 (we have a cat for our anxiety)

Food shopping $400 (this includes both human and cat food as well as travel expenses to get to and from an affordable grocery store to do the big shop once a month because we do not have a car or if that option is not feasible then to pay for grocery delivery through Shipt)

Medical expenses $600 (at minimum, sometimes more) (Sertraline x2, Ritalin, Quetiapine, Duloxetine, Labs and blood work, Testosterone, and immunotherapy.)

Toiletries $75 ish (pads, tissue, soap, toothpaste, laundry detergent, dish soap/pods, cleaning suppplies)

Totaling $3,285.50/month (until November when this will increase to $4,631.49)

Currently we are both working full time jobs, no health insurance, no car, no savings.

After taxes we bring in a combined income of $5,050/month and as shown above $3,285 of that is unavoidably spoken for until November to February when $4,631.49 of that will be spoken for.

All this to say that we do not have room to pay off the necessary debt that would allow us to apply to, get approved for, and move into a new apartment within our budget and needs. We would really appreciate any kind of help that could be given. We just really want to be in a place that doesn’t make our already pretty bad health issues even worse. In addition, we want to be able to know that what we are bringing in will be enough to support ourselves without the overwhelming worry of “will we need to crowdfund and borrow this month?” and “will it be enough?”

If you’ve read this far thank you so much and please consider reblogging and sharing this and/or donating!