#so don't throw away this thing we had

[udnergecko]

okay i'm really impressed with myself that I managed to sing the END of you'll be back in the tags lol

Supplement deez nuts in ur face GET OUT OF THE ACE TAG

[taegularities]

some men are textbook villains fr

[nyan-bynary]

I'm gonna have to wait out a few weeks to be able to complain about jjk's ending bc rn half the ppl are bashing everyone who expected more as ppl who just wanted gojo back

[im2tired4usernames]

Ugh I was excited for today until I found out I'd have to spend it with people that actively make me hate being alive hate the future and drain me off all energy physically mentally spiritually like a vampire I can't stand to be around her she is the definition of stupidity and even then that's generous as fuck this bitch has filled her brain with so much garbage I watch her brain cells die at alarming rates every single time she uses her vocal cords her giggles make me want to jam a sewing needle into my ear repeatedly so I can never have to hear it again its a friendly reminder that my parents decisions this time my dad's constantly makes me want to die

[guhhhhhhhhhhh]

Oh little people in my phone, we're really in it now 😔😔

[whentherewerebicycles]

question: when you're starting a new job, what do you most want out of your first week of onboarding? what's most helpful for you to know/understand upfront? also... what's not helpful? tell me your onboarding nightmare stories too lol

[phantajam]

my hot take about descendants is that NONE of the core four were ready for a relationship until maybe like, the third movie (rant in tags)

[unproduciblesmackdown]

also it's something (better) like, the exercise of deliberately [art imitates life imitates art] holding up Billions to My IRL Things Perspective and going like whaaat would i want for winston. first answer is you want any character to not have been within the scope of the show in the first place, and to exit it since they are. and you kind of get that in the accidental reward in banishing winston, since like in the end it's just that the show doesn't care about him existing at that point But like it's winston sitting there quietly as everyone leaves & turns out the lights & Then he can leave too; others have peaced out & nobody remembers he exists so Now he can go off & do whatever.

but like in true form i think they definitely accidentally baked in another divine reward for winston in that, like, the way he's kept around as fodder for these fun little [pov: enjoy abusing this guy] asides with him, where it Just So Happens that he's autistic as something they're unaware of but is completely relevant to the expectation we understand him to be inferior(tm), it Just So Happens that he's also ""bad"" at not ""causing"" abuse to be turned on him. he's ""bad"" at staying in line. like well yes Yes that's what i want for him. just like In Real Life it's like yeah Ideally i'd want people to be able to extricate themselves from where they're trapped in power structures & i'd want them to have the perspective about it of understanding they're not Inferior / i.e. they are as much a person as anyone else and they're not corrupting everything good / i.e. it wasn't them Bringing It Upon Themselves and it's not them being Destructive by toppling a jenga tower of a hierarchy that happened to be pressing down on them. and winston is the kind of [the ruinerrrrrr] who is Turned On exactly because he keeps acting like someone who's on the verge of breaking out of the [being in line] someone demands of him as autist, employee, whatever other supposed manifestations of [inferior]

like in the 5 second stretches in which winston's allowed to speak before retaliation, it's because he's like "matter of factly" delivering whatever Information that's useful for another plotline. then he Brings It Upon Himself by making people aware that he's Also existing in his own right as a person rather than what they think serves their own deal / what they want from him at all times, perhaps by expressing his personality (didn't appeal to them! so it was Wrong) or not b/c of anything in particular said or done at present, just b/c people have a constant / accumulating contempt for him so their being in the same room as him & able to see & hear him is already dangerous. the [we're just seeing Any Abusive Dynamic in action] continuing apace.

and it's like, well, right there. he's written as acting like someone who doesn't blame himself for how he's treated, which billions frames as being Rude & Mean, and so too does everyone's abusers lmfao like and that these are his moments that are written to be Bringing It Upon Himself. and it's like hell yeah he doesn't blame himself. hell yeah that his self-esteem can manifest as anger at all. hell yeah that he keeps expressing himself with personality & confidence & doesn't even disguise his having been hurt, & it's this [his ass is Not grey rocking] that billions frames as both him "causing" his abuse & making that abuse "successful" lol, wrow just like real life!! and when like speaking of real life yeah it's not "bad" that people Do engage in strategies to mitigate & survive, including things like blaming themselves or being too "boring" to be anything but a non dialogued background character b/c that's all that goes unpunished, it's bad b/c it's done to them at all, not [ohh they're doing it to themselvesss] and like i'm asking myself like Ideally. what do i want Ideally. and i'd want winston to know that it's being Done To Him & i'd want him to find as much room for his personhood & autonomy as possible. and that's basically how he's written anyways, and billions hates that like You See this is why he deserves it this is why he's doing it to himself. and i'm like my god if that's not Inspiration for like "so what if people don't find you Personally Likable" and not preemptively holding back all personality or anything that'd draw attention as if you exist as a person in your own right & not something that only either gets in the way of or serves their wants of a Real person (someone with more power) like hell yeah you have him out here doing it =']

another fun addendum is like, billions isn't getting into it much b/c it doesn't seem to care much about "what if some people were peers & seem to have a genuine, recipcrocal relationship?" but that it just so happened to be like "oh tuk as the next closest loser who deserves it might be nice to winston" while it's framing winston as the "worse" Loser as being....unconditionally supportive of tuk. while the one downside of billions Also giving bentuk as much as it is is that it also inevitably has that shadow of "but ben is Superior to tuk" and like that it's correct that everyone encourages tuk to Stop Bringing It Upon Himself and start being less of a loser; it's wrong for winston to be like hey let's go have a foursome. like yeah probably don't make a list of the women you work with you'd be dtf but it's not like i'm convinced "ah billions and it's strong anti misogyny stance like" roflmao and billions is Not reflecting on "the downsides of unconditional support?" there when winston was beaten up for criticising taylor earlier like we WILL take his ideas while looting his [beaten unconscious] body there but he WAS wrong to express them as though he's BETTER than taylor!!! mafee's beautiful show of loyalty in kicking his ass even when he might agree with the argument and then benefit when it's adopted by taylor anyways! so it's as usual actually purely based on hierarchy & who gets to be in charge of people. it's correct for ben to be in charge of tuk, unless he has to step aside for that bizarre dead-end subplot about how it's tuk's fault if he's treated badly, b/c it's really his own Failure to have Confidence to know he has good ideas [raising our voice to deliver this message over the sound of breaking desks and chairs and computer monitors over winston because he had the confidence to act like he deserved to talk to someone and because he knows his ideas efforts & results are good & valuable around there] like. and isn't it sooo fucked up to talk about who you're dtf in the episode that has it be neutral if your boss is dtf & lets you know but is nice about it (and you're already Correctly tending to their ego, which you're responsible for!) like hey no possible problem! it's not even so much of a problem for a boss man to have the sex they're entitled to & be rude about their leveraging their power in that acquisition that it Stays a problem into the next season. ew, winston is Known (Inferred) Dtf??? we'll use it to exploit His vulnerability, exacerbate it, & punish him further for good measure in another episode that just revels in abuse & violation with a sexual aspect once again, but like, hey tuk don't do that, winston's such a Bad Influence for being like, shrug, kneejerk intervening with the Good Friendship where the One In Charge leaps in & Tells tuk the Correct thing to do. obviously there's also the tragedy that billions will Never let winston push back against Real Winners like rian or taylor in A Way That Matters (actually gets in their way at all) lol like. one thing that would have really been fun, winston should've literal kneejerk started physically fighting wags in either pertinent scene in 7x03 for real 110%. i wouldn't be like Gasp Violence Is Never The Answer if he just hit someone to hit them b/c fuck you. or broke anything on his way out etc etc. billions would Never let him. which is the other side of the same coin of [why he should get to]

tl;dr how great that winston's being "out of line" means he's basically always noticeably flouting & rebelling against the [He Deserves Abuse] agenda lol. that IS what i want. his being "beyond hope" like ohhh he's sooo stupid he doesn't realize how much he has the bad tastes & wrong interests & annoying personality He Will Always Be This Way like hell yeah!!! billions like oh no winston's personhood will never stay tamped down & locked away such that some godawful person tolerates keeping him in their inventory :( ohhh the ABA will never work :( that's right!!!!!!!!!! although they're not sad about it because it's about relishing the promise there will always be True Inferiors you can enjoy abusing with your righteous power over, but like well you wrote him escaping anyways even while dragging other "better" characters into standing around to serve axe's need for more than 1.8 employees and [crickets, reverberating cough, sneaker scuff] like. another ""wrong"" thing for winston to do, another thing for him to not "deserve," which is itself godawful actually lol like lord what it "rewards" its Good, Deserving characters with, no thanks. meanwhile winston's punishment is that he's autistic and """bad""" at being abused like lmfao good for him, fantastic for him, just what i want

[vampirejuno]

I need some sort of contraption that will zap me with 200v of electricity every time I look through old pictures or scroll through particular blogs or some such. It wouldn't stop me probably but it just sounds like something I should have

[confinesofmy]

me and my cousin i'm barely on speaking terms with (but in a relatively casual way) repotted her deceased grandmother's pothos today. this was our first time actually properly repotting it bc last summer it was in such a fragile state and we were so scared to hurt it that we just lifted it out of its pot and placed it in a bigger one but this go round we basically dismantled it entirely. we got eight discrete plants and placed it into four different pots!! in nine months it went from the edge of death to that many plants and like ninety leaves altogether. so if you're bad with plants but still wanna fool with them, i guess you should get a pothos.

[saxifactumterritum]

I can't really stop thinking about Jeeves putting on/taking off his drag in Bertie Wooster's room. sitting at his little fancy table with the mirror (I do know the word I've forgotten it).

[littleletterstoelijah]

By the time we speak again and you still haven't sought God, because I'm constantly trying to seek Him, I'd be so utterly repulsed by your lifestyle and darkened heart that I won't be able to love you romantically anymore so you better seek Him in your own accord.

[chronicbitchsyndrome]

i have been in community with profoundly developmentally disabled peers and peers with brain damage my whole life, bc i had a childhood diagnosis. i have also been leftist my whole life; my mother was a marxist and raised me that way, and while their politics were absolute dogshit, they were lefty dogshit.

my entire life, i have seen leftist educators throw mentally disabled people away as "lost causes" because they couldn't engage with the material the way it was being presented. leftist outreach and education does, genuinely, have a massive lack of accessible material. to be blunt, people are not interested in retrofitting their leftist outreach to be accessible to people who learn best through episodes of sesame street.

as in, i have repeatedly faced outright laughter and cruelty over the idea that this could be a priority. or even something that we consider doing at all.

"people who are that mentally disabled don't need to know about these things," the kindest interpretation goes. ("people who are that mentally disabled don't interact with the world, anyway, they're all in institutions or monitored 24/7 by their parents," the uncharitable underlying assumptions go. "they wouldn't be a worker who needs a union. or a library attendee. or a member of the community garden. or a volunteer at the food bank. or or or")

the people i have seen this hurt the worst, over and over again, are profoundly mentally disabled people of color whose lack of access to accessible antiracist education is causing real danger in their lives. institutionalized disabled people of color who have learned racist ideology and behaviors from white authority, whether they were adopted by white families or incarcerated in care institutions run by white staff. who are treated lower than garbage by leftist educators, who view them as "lost causes," as unworthy of time and effort and attention, as deserving of their abuses because they... what... internalized the abuses that make up every aspect of their lives since birth?

i see people saying things in this conversation like "disability isn't an excuse for racism or transphobia or whatever, people have the obligation to improve themselves." oh, believe me, i have seen again and again how many privileged disabled people utilize their disabilities to punch down on others, try to escape accountability for their punching down by citing disability. but individual weaponization of identity is just that: weaponization of identity.

the power structures at play are what they are. it is a noble and admirable goal to want leftist outreach and education to be more accessible to all. if that is truly your goal, you must eventually reckon with the existence of people who do, actually, really need it presented in a picture book. or an episode of bluey. or a conversation where you only use examples of people they know in real life, using things that happened to them personally. the existence of people who cannot grasp forms of abstract reasoning, who need information presented as rules, or as guidelines, or as categories. the idea that yes, fully grown adults who need daniel tiger to explain racism to them are human beings who not only deserve access to that very thing, but who also deserve to be a part of leftist spaces and benefit from leftist organizing. are people for whom it might be INTEGRAL they get to be a part of leftism. are victims of racism themselves and suffering without access to antiracist spaces and community and support.

and you will need to reckon with the abject cruelty of your peers who laugh and mock the very idea of this. you need to reckon with the fact that a lot of people you respect, a lot of leftists doing genuinely good work, will respond to this by making fun of the people you're serving, even outright telling you their violent fantasies about these people. that is the experience of organizing in leftist spaces for profoundly disabled people. that is why so many of us burn out so fast. there IS a structural problem with mentally disabled people being seen as disposable and not a part of community. and it is EXTREMELY present in leftist organizing and outreach efforts.

[inkskinned]

at the end of the day it's not that you hate your job - actually, you like working, you like routine, you like feeling like an adult - it's that any time you fuck anything up, you feel like you're fucking dying.

because you could be actually fucking dying. because if one day you wake up and you misunderstood something - you could lose your job, and nobody is hiring, and nobody is paying, and nobody takes people like you, and that job you want hasn't gotten back to you. and what exactly are you going to do without insurance? good luck with those meds. you should have thought of that before being a person.

so it's not just that you forgot to CC someone on an email, it's that if you don't have this job, you can't afford rent. it's not that you misread a comment, it's that if you get fired, you will be in massive amounts of unpayable debt. it's not that you are bad at your job, but here are the stakes as they have been decided for you: be perfect or fucking die. like, literally, die. that is how much safety net you have: none.

it's not burnout, technically. but you literally just had two typos in your work, and you're already picturing the ending. you want to throw up & curl up & make it all go away. it is two typos. if he decides he is mad at you, you lose literally everything.

your mom says that you seem stressed. the thing is that you have never known a job that isn't stressful. welcome to capitalism. there is no other road, only this one. what the fuck is a career. you come here, and we hold your life against the barrel of a gun, and somewhere someone is spinning the chamber and pulling. eventually the bullet will come.

you live in a mugging. your boss owns three cars and has four kids. you worry about having enough to feed your dog. good luck. beg for forgiveness. CC the right people next time and be grateful, kid. somebody has it worse than you. someone, probably, has it worse than you. so what if you can't sleep or eat or focus. your work chat sound literally makes you panic. you had to change the sounds of computer notifications so you'd stop having such an upset stomach.

welcome to the real world! the rat race! the dog eat dog circus!

your doctor studies the results and frowns at you. "it's bad for your heart," she says. "try to reduce your levels of stress."

[ourceliumnetwork]

y'know. i don't often hate the way my brain is and how difficult it makes certain things for me.

i do a little today though.

[beeseverywhen]

Not in the US so can't speak for what's happening there, but I've def noticed here that healthcare workers are struggling with dealing with sicker patients than they felt they were getting before covid and lots of them are mentioning a lack of immunity thanks to lockdowns. every time I hear it I can't help but think that the increasing desperation thanks to years of underfunding that's really beginning to have an impact since covid (because the pandemic served as the last straw on the camels back there AND because it showed our government that they could neglect the vulnerable to the degree that they were dying by the thousands and still nobody bothered to blame them.) Is a contributing factor in this and I don't understand why nobody is mentioning it???

We're getting sick because we've spent decades being bled dry and now we're hungry, stressed and being worked to the bone. Meanwhile we aren't getting any kind of return on the money we're pumping in to the healthcare system and our governments aren't doing shit to address health inequalities or any of the factors contributing to everyone's poor health.

If you look at covid death statistics, if you look at which countries are currently suffering from supply problems; a job market bursting with unfilled vacancies, civil unrest and protests, strained healthcare systems, and all the rest; the countries at the top are those that have allowed capitalism to call the shots for the past century, more than the rest. That is why the UK and America have been so badly impacted. Its no accident that we are paying so heavily, this system started with us. We forced it on the rest of the world and now, we're the first to pay the price. There is a direct correlation between the impact being felt post covid and a countries wealth divide and I'm tired of everyone ignoring that.

I look around me and People are going hungry, the food they can afford to buy is lacking in basic nutrients, of course people are sicker! Even if you can afford them, the shops keep running out of vegetables! Our health system was already breaking and then, we were hit by a pandemic it was completely unprepared for (tho it should have been) and now, people are getting way more ill than they need to before they finally reach hospital. When they get there, the hospitals are understaffed (thanks to years of underfunded budgets and the extreme stress so many health care workers were put under), we keep having drug shortages because our country keep straight up refusing to pay how much things cost, and what they are willing to pay, goes to pay about ten profiteering middle men at each stage of the supply chain.

People are massively stressed thanks to the cumulative weight of a completely broken capitalist system and those in charge are more worried about lining their pockets for as long as they can until the whole thing collapses, rather than actually trying to address any problems. Stress IS something that's known to weaken immune systems so why are we blaming something that MAY affect them??? Extreme rises in energy costs have meant everyone's spent a winter without adequate heating (even those that can afford it are revolting at the increase and so are trying to cut costs by using less energy.) Again, insufficiently heated homes are also known to affect immunity. And that's just the people who still have safe homes! Masses of people have been made homeless recently thanks to rising rents and mortgages which were already unaffordable, our housing stock is largely dangerous, with homes falling in to disrepair because landlords are barely regulated and when they do break laws they go unprotected.

Is anyone surprised that so many people are getting so ill and not getting better? Cause I'm not.

It's startlingly obvious when you start looking at the health divide between those who have spent 40 years subject to the whims of poorly restricted capitalism and those able to opt out. Medical technology is improving, but healthy life expectancy is now dropping year on year, because there are more people living here without the capital to turn away from jobs that will break them, than there are those whose inherited wealth opens doors away from employers that'll ask you to pay the price of bodily health, so they might strengthen profit margins. Its just basic averages. 1% of our citizens are standing on the backs of 99% of us and wondering why more and more of that 99% are getting sicker and sicker. The labour market for working class people has been allowed to drain its workers dry for years now. The progress made in the early to mid 20th century has slowly been worn away at, with the labour laws we fought for, only being accessible for an ever decreasing number of people. The laws are still in place but no low wage employer bothers to follow them any more than they have to. Do you know how many people I know who've been working without breaks, going unpaid for extra hours, been forced to follow unsafe working practices that they know are illegal and then being forced to lie to protect the employer that put them in that position? The people being broken by companies raking in billions, as they flaunt labour laws, don't have any means to access justice! If you complain, you lose your job. If you take them to court that costs money and that company is willing to drag out proceedings for years till you run out of the money needed to keep things going.

When i look at how much money is being wasted in government budgets, while the people responsible for making that money, see little return; I can't help but think of various theories for why certain societies in history have collapsed. (If you want to be really worried about the state of things, read the Wikipedia page on societal collapse. Spoiler: most of the potential causes of societal collapse have already begun in America and the UK. That guy who wrote that article saying America was already past the point of collapse might have been right.) One theory behind the bronze age collapse is just that... societies became too complex. A society where the 1% are given too much power over the 99% becomes one great big pyramid scheme. Unnecessary burecracy at every level (designed to squeeze as much wealth possible for the person overseeing that level) results in those at the bottom, working themselves to death and still going hungry. The theory goes that there comes a point, in societies like that, where the workers look at how they are living and just...walk away. They decide that the security once offered by that society isn't worth what it's costing them and fuck off to become farmers, preferring a life of hard work and little security, to what they had been living. Without the workers, the system breaks down. The only people getting fed are the ones growing the food. All this stupid stratification. Allowing every supply chain, business and institution to become unnecessarily complex just so on each level the people in charge can let their mates get a foot in on the profits. All these middlemen. Business consultants. Supply chains allow for a product to be sent back and forth from country to country just so more people get a cut. Its no different to any other pyramid scheme so why the hell are we allowing it.

We need to start telling our politicians to show some goddamn accountability for this shit. Stop accepting them skirting responsibility for being at best: Inept and at worst deliberately negligent. We all need to stop supporting a system that's hurting us all. In the hope that we might be one of the lucky ones. That's not the reality of things. We'll only get out of this hole we've inadvertently dug ourselves in to, if we stop fighting each other and work together to demand change.

You know how sometimes you catch someone in a lie, and so they tell an even bigger lie to try and cover up the first lie they told?

Well, that’s happening right now.

Last winter, a handful of celebrity doctors went on mainstream news networks to assure us that Omicron was “mild.” They carpet-bombed us with articles and tweets, doing their best to brainwash everyone.

They were wrong.

In the end, real science junked that idea. An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that Omicron killed more people than previous variants, even when adjusting for other factors. Another study by doctors at Massachusetts General and Harvard Medical found that Omicron was just as deadly. In fact, “the risks of hospitalization and mortality were nearly identical.” As it turns out, the entire idea of “mild” Omicron was based on an old, flawed idea known as the law of declining virulence, developed by a doctor who was studying tick-borne disease in cows. It was debunked decades ago.

Most epidemiologists know that viruses don’t magically evolve to become milder. Virus evolution is random and chaotic.

In some cases, viruses evolve to become more deadly.

A handful of actual scientists tried to explain all this last winter, including disease experts at Johns Hopkins. A handful of other established experts spoke out against this myth. As a microbiologist at Penn State told Politifact, “You can’t just say it’s going to become nicer.” They were largely ignored, because everyone already sort of believed the misinformation. If they knew it was based on a study about cows, they probably would’ve thought twice.

This year, the makers of “it’s mild” are back.

They’re selling “immunity debt.”

We should be skeptical.

Schools and daycares are sending letters home to parents talking about this “immunity debt.” They’re saying that healthy children are getting sicker, even dying, because they weren’t exposed to enough germs over the last two years. Newspapers and TV stations across the country are running with it, proposing it as a “possible reason” for this year’s explosion in pediatric hospitalizations. Meanwhile, major medical organizations have sent a letter to President Biden urging him to declare an emergency over an “alarming surge of pediatric hospitalizations” due to a range of respiratory viruses, including Covid.

A lot of people are drinking the “immunity debt” kool-aid.

After all, Americans have believed for generations that getting sick is “good for you.” We think our immune system behaves like a muscle. We worry that if we’re not giving it a workout, we’ll get weak.

It’s a myth, just like the law of declining virulence.

Here’s why.