Supervilliany isn’t a matter of morality, it’s a matter of obsession. If you have the kind of obsessive interest it takes to pursue a doctorate in a field that’s not readily financially lucrative then you’ve said or heard the phrase “I’ll show you! I’ll show you all!” at some point in academia
• eat dark chocolate and blueberries and walnuts and salmon and other foods high in antioxidants!!
• play little brain games on your phone; I like wordconenct! anything that makes you think!
• read books. It’s simple but necessary. Even better - join a book club, or read with a friend, so you can have discussions after. This will improve your reading comprehension.
• do puzzles - it doesnt have to be sudoku, I love playing Beat Saber on the Oculus Rift because it makes my brain have to match colorful patterns to physical movements very quickly!
• learn a new dance - even a tik tok trendy dance. Learning new dance moves are proven to strengthen synapses!!
• go bird watching, or foraging, or anything outdoors that requires you to explore pattern recognition and visual searching
• watch a movie with the intent of analysis - this is best done with a cinephile friend!! talk about tropes and symbolism and character growth
• cross stitch, or sew, or do anything that requires matching nimble hand movements to patterns
• play or learn an instrument!
• develop a consistent sleep schedule (or as close to consistent as you can get!)
• when eating, try to identify the ingredients and flavors you’re perceiving!
I hope this helps :)
(recreated since the original writer of this reply was a terf lol)
I like how this went from me feeling like “hm why is this attacking me 🤨” at first, but feeling grateful seeing an added guide on a genuine expansion on a “ how to” work out the brain. This genuinely helps a bunch. People find solace in doing activities that get them through life by doing said activities of phone/tv or if that’s all they’ve ever known in their life to get them through things + etc tho. However, this was very impt to point out. Slowly beginning incorporating things to work the brain in ones own time.
wait. this is hilarious. They were contractually obligated to keep it, so when it was universally hated, they added an option to completely erase it from the dashboard without getting in trouble for removing it …… “snooze tumblr live” is funnier than we thought
Guys literally all of this is good news ,..they’re gonna be changing their approach to everything and focusing more on core functionality. which we all know this site needs. And they’re not downscaling any part of the trust & safety team so moderation should .. at least not be getting any worse
Love that the car at the back is like ‘WTF is wrong with these losers? I’m gonna overtake!’ Then it see the baby swans and it like, 'Oh! My bad.’ And pulls in again.
I find swan parenting so interesting and relatable. Although they’re closely related to ducks, their strategies are entirely different. A mother duck is usually typified by being “careless” with her babies, meaning that she just goes wherever without consideration for them, and they struggle to keep up; ducks don’t really comprehend what terrain or situations are inaccessible for ducklings, so you’ll often see a mother duck carelessly using stairs, or flying off a building or cliff, while her babies literally die trying to follow. Ducks aren’t noted for their situational awareness, but this is really shocking to watch in the case of Mama Duck. She doesn’t usually check behind her, can’t manage them through complex situations, and gives no impression of even having any idea of how many babies she has (that’s why it’s a good thing she often has 14 in babies a clutch, and can pull off 2 clutches a year; in the wild, most of these are expected to die, as a sort of background protein link in the food web.) (On a farmyard, you might give them to a broody hen to raise, as they’ll have a more attentive parent that way.)
Swans, by contrast, take two parents about a year to raise about seven babies, and they RAISE them. They’re very attentive and conscious of their children’s safety. Even in this short video you can see that one parent is leading the children while the other keeps an eye on the card, using body language to communicate with partner and cars. The straight fixed glare at the car not only gives the swan a better look, but is also the polite first indication that the swan wants space (blowing past this signal is one reason why human/swan interactions quickly become antagonistic.) they’re walking very slowly and deliberately, which (unintentionally) forces the cars to treat them like pedestrians, but is an unusually slow pace aimed at making it very easy for the very young babies to follow properly.
I don’t know. I just like swans. I like their confidence in the human world, and their firm belief that everyone can follow the Swan Rules and behave properly if they try. I like that they relate to us and therefore have expectations that we’ll follow Swan Rules. They cross at the crosswalk because that’s what is Done and they expect everyone to respect how things are Done. In every post about swans on social media there will always be several comments about how swans are violent and it will always be down to: “they expect us to know how things are Done, and get mad when we don’t.”
So, okay, fun fact. When I was a freshman in high school… let me preface by saying my dad sent me to a private school and, like a bad organ transplant, it didn’t take. I was miserable, the student body hated me, I hated them, it was awful.
Okay, so, freshman year, I’m deep in my “everything sucks and I’m stuck with these assholes” mentality. My English teacher was a notorious hard-ass, let’s call him Mr. Hargrove. He was the guy every student prayed they didn’t get. And, on top of ALL OF THE SHIT I WAS ALREADY DEALING WITH, I had him for English.
One of the laborious assignments he gave us was to keep a daily journal. Daily! Not monthly or weekly. Fucking daily. Handwritten. And we had to turn it in every quarter and he fucking graded us. He graded us on a fucking journal.
All of my classmates wrote shit like what they did that day or whatever. But, I did not. No, sir. I decided to give the ol’ middle finger to the assignment and do my own shit.
So, for my daily journal entries, over the course of an entire year, I wrote a serialized story about a horde of man-eating slugs that invaded a small mining town. It was graphic, it was ridiculous, it was an epic feat of rebellion.
And Mr. Hargrove loved it.
It wasn’t just the journal. Every assignment he gave us, I tried to shit all over it. Every reading assignment, everyone gushed about how good it was, but I always had a negative take. Every writing assignment, people wrote boring prose, but I wrote cheesy limericks or pulp horror stories.
Then, one day, he read one of my essays to the class as an example of good writing. When a fellow student asked who wrote it, he said, “Some pipsqueak.”
And that’s when I had a revelation. He wanted to fight. And since all the other students were trying to kiss his ass, I was his only challenger.
Mr. Hargrove and I went head-to-head on every assignment, every conversation, every fucking thing. And he ate it up. And so did I.
One day, he read us a column from the Washington Post and asked the class what was wrong with it. Everyone chimed in with their dumbass takes, but I was the one who landed on Mr. Hargrove’s complaint: The reporter had BRAZENLY added the suffix “ize” to a verb.
That night I wrote a jokey letter to the reporter calling him out on the offense in which I added “ize” to every single verb. I gave it to Mr. Hargrove, who by then had become a friendly adversary, for a chuckle and he SENT IT TO THE REPORTER.
And, people… The reporter wrote back. And he said I was an exceptional student. Mr. Hargrove and I had a giggle about that because we both knew I was just being an asshole, but he and the reporter acknowledged I had a point.
And that was it. That was the moment. Not THAT EXACT moment, but that year with Mr. Hargrove taught me I had a knack for writing. And that knack was based in saying “fuck you” to authority. (The irony that someone in a position of authority helped me realize that is not lost on me.)
So, I can say without qualification that Mr. Hargrove is the reason I am now a professional writer. Yes, I do it for a living. And most of my stuff takes authorities of one kind or another to task.
Mr. Hargrove showed me my dissent was valid, my rebellion was righteous, and that killer slugs could bring a city to its knees. Someone just needs to write it.
This is the first time I’ve seen this post but I know I’m gonna love reading it every time it shows up on my dash
Before 10th grade we took a test to get into honors English, and I wasn’t on the list.
My mother called the teacher, who looked at the essay I’d submitted, and said, “Someone graded this maliciously, you’re in the class.” (It had been graded by a third party.)
Later, he called her to ask if it was possible I’d plagiarized something because the writing was too mature. She laughed at him. And he believed her when she said I was too cocky to copy anyone else’s work, and from then on, he was my best English teacher at that school.
I butted heads with half that English department, but him? He got me.
I butted heads with
half that English department,
but him? He got me.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
My dad was dealing with some mixed feelings so I told him “In therapy when something is too complicated to do a simple ‘pro and contra list’ we sometimes do an excercise where you imagine all these mixed feelings around a table in some kind of conference, letting each tell their bit and you leading the debate.”
and my dad didn’t really respond and just stared ahead so I kept preparing lunch. Until a few minutes later when he suddenly piped up: “I am having a bad time at the conference”
I too am having a bad time at the conference
Reblog if you too are having a bad time at the conference
My dad was dealing with some mixed feelings so I told him “In therapy when something is too complicated to do a simple ‘pro and contra list’ we sometimes do an excercise where you imagine all these mixed feelings around a table in some kind of conference, letting each tell their bit and you leading the debate.”
and my dad didn’t really respond and just stared ahead so I kept preparing lunch. Until a few minutes later when he suddenly piped up: “I am having a bad time at the conference”
I too am having a bad time at the conference
Reblog if you too are having a bad time at the conference
i do not care if someone learned compassion from a cartoon or a comic or an anime im just glad they’re here with us now a better person fighting the good fight. should it have taken something so trivial? maybe not- but it’s in the past! and this is the now! and if they’re objectively better for it who cares
“it took gay shipping for this adult to stop being homophobic 😬” ok but they stopped being actively homophobic. that’s what you just said. that’s literally the only important part you understand that right? this is a win for everyone you get that?
we all start somewhere and im going to be real buddy i only care about the harm you did or didn’t cause on your journey and where you ended up. whatever set it off only matters as much as you want it too
Surely that is a major part of why we want more representation in mainstream media in the first place. It’s very weird to campaign for good portrayals and then get mad when they work.
A friend of mine wrote, some years back, about her 85-year-old grandmother who was sort of vaguely homophobic until a nice gay couple moved in and she saw them gardening and they were social and friendly and good neighbors, and then she declared that obviously they were fine, and if God had a problem with them, she would give God a good talking-to.
The confidence of an 85-year-old woman can be an amazing thing to behold from a safe distance.
This is literally how humans work.
It’s how it worked on all of us. Some of us don’t remember the moment we internalized this, the moment of “ah, yes, humans-like-me, good” for whatever group you want to think of that usually has their humanity denied, but it still happened and if it happened early enough it was probably even more trivial than the above. But it still happened. It happened to you, and it happened to me, and none of it was instilled from Purest Wisdom and Virtue, it came from small social acts and moments of realization stacked together and worked into our nervous systems.
We are scared primates attempting to live with more than seven billion other scared primates with brains that just keep getting more complicated on us but are built on foundations of scared fish eons ago. Thank fucking gods we also packbond with anything or we really would be hopelessly doomed, so also let’s fucking find a way to make that work for us.
Stop fucking complaining when something helpful and small and trivial helps another scared primate go “oh shit wait, that primate isn’t a threat to me, we can be friends”. Be fucking grateful that all it took was some free socially-engaged-with fiction on the internet that took us one step further towards not tearing each other to shit; that it just took a cartoon, or some gardening. Given the history of humanity that’s kind of a fucking miracle! Let’s make some more cartoons and write some more slash and do some more gardening!
it obviously makes sense, but one of my friend’s kids is going into swim class, and all the parents got an email today going, “when little ones are scared, they cling on to instructors. PLEASE trim their nails.”
i don’t know why that’s so funny to me, but just. the idea of this poor, scratched swim instructor having to make sure to email before each class as a reminder to please declaw the children SENT me.
When I taught swim lessons I remember trying to delicately ask parents not to cover their child in shea/coconut/olive oil before lessons.
“I understand your skincare regimen and wanting to protect their tender baby flesh from the pool chemicals, but COULD YOU NOT OIL YOUR CHILD LIKE A GREASED PIG before tossing them in the POOL? Thanks EVER so much!”
I don’t respect christianity but they kinda popped off with cathedrals but ONLY for the purpose of having a cool backdrop for fighting horrible nightmare beasts
What if they have snails crawling down the outside?
God there’s something about taking care of others. There’s something about choosing to be in a role that allows you to protect and care for. Something so absolutely human and love filled about people coming to you for aid, or running to someone’s side. To revive, bandage, pull back up, bring back from the dead or place a shield over. I want to scream and cry, in a situation where healing truly doesn’t matter (you can respawn, re-queue, so on) we created a role just for taking care of others.
It gets worse. When I worked for a nonprofit ARC (Association for Retarded Citizens - yes they use that word in the name) I was tasked with conducting “time studies” of disabled workers to determine their hourly wage.
Basically the way a time study worked is an “able-bodied” worker was timed doing a task. This became the standard. Then disable workers would be timed doing the same task. If they performed 60% as fast as the set standard, they’d only be paid 60% of the hourly wage set for the task.
Which sucks.
But, it gets even worse.
I was tasked with conducting the time studies so I head out and start doing them. The majority of the disabled workers were performing to 85% or better of the “able-bodied” times.
I turned the reports in and was told, “that’s not possible. Do them again.”
So I did them again. We’re talking a few hundred time studies.
The results were the same. In fact at least a dozen of the workers actually improved their previous times.
I turned them in and was told, “This can’t be right. They can’t be doing that well.”
I told them results spoke for themselves. They (the head of the client services department [at this ARC disabled workers were called clients]) said it wasn’t possible for the workers to be performing above 65% at the highest. So I must be doing something wrong or falsely reporting to try and get the clients more money.
I vehemently denied this.
So they sent me to do the studies a third time. This time with a supervisor to ensure no funny business on my part.
Once again, the disabled workers performed to an average of 85% of the standard.
With the supervisor’s approval I turned in the third set of reports.
I was told that the standard time must be out of date. Go and time one of the abled workers and use the new time as the standard and conduct all of the hundreds of studies a fourth time.
So, I went and timed an abled worker. Their time was slower than the existing standard. Not wanting to get yelled at, I decided to time 10 Abled workers and average their times to get the new standard.
The new standard was only 6 seconds faster, but it was faster.
So, using the new time standard, I did all of the time studies again.
And again, the disabled workers times averaged out to about 85% of standard. With a good number of them performing at 100%.
I girded my loins and turned the studies in.
I feel like I should mention that these studies are reviewed by ADA and the State Labor Board for compliance with the “sub minimum wage” rules. So they’re a big deal. Because if an ARC or similar organization is found in violation of the rules it could be the end of that organization.
I was already pretty nervous about the fact that we’d conducted so many studies and how that would look. But I was just a 22 yr old worker bee also earning just minimum wage ($8.25/hr) and didn’t want to lose my job.
So yeah, turned in the studies. And was told by the DIRECTOR OF CLIENT SERVICES - the person who was supposed to be the TOP advocate for the disabled workers at this ARC - that if we paid the disabled workers at their reported rates that it would impact her annual bonus.
She then told me to go back and falsify the reports to average 65% performance.
I refused.
So she fired me for “violating dress code”.
I couldn’t afford a lawyer, so I couldn’t file a lawsuit for illegal dismissal.
[ID: SAG-AFTRA picket sign with the logo of a person with a raised fist and the text, “SAG-AFTRA ON STRIKE!” The picture was taken near the Sony building and “Sony Pictures” and “Sony Music Publishing” can be seen on a sign to the right. end ID]
On November 8, SAG-AFTRA reached a tentative deal with the AMPTP to end the strike. What can we as fans & audiences do to continue supporting the unions?
DONATE TO STRIKE FUNDS!
The devastating effects of both strikes on every entertainment worker AND those not in entertainment, but affected by the work stoppages, are going to continue to be felt for months, even years, down the line. PLEASE don’t let up your financial support just because the strikes are over! Please keep boosting posts about how to support the unions! Tip: schedule the posts for a week or a month down the line so they keep circulating.
WGA and SAG-AFTRA have won, but you know who still needs a deal? The Animation Guild will have negotiations next year. IATSE, aka International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which represents technicians and craftspeople, is going to enter into negotiations next year. Teamsters (unionized drivers, including the ones essential to Hollywood sets!) are going into negotiations next year. It is essential that we show up for other unions like we showed up for WGA/SAG-AFTRA. And if you haven’t yet… have YOU considered joining a union?
CORRECT MISINFORMATION AND BIASED NARRATIVES!
Lots of people—both in the immediate future and a few years down the line—are going to think they’ve drawn correct conclusions from the strike that are absolutely false. False ideas like WGA/SAG-AFTRA were the ones that dragged out the strikes, that it was unnecessary to put such a strain on the economy, and so on.
Prove them wrong—and cite your sources! WGA/SAG-AFTRA’s Twitter updates and websitearticles updated during the strikes are a good resource, as are eyewitness accounts from those of us who were active participants in fandoms supporting the unions. Don’t let the narrative get turned around. Unions are essential, strikes work, and it was the solidarity between varied workers and their audiences that forced the AMPTP back to the table.
You’re damn right I’ll combine Latin and Greek base words in any world-building, motherfucker I’ll combine them in the same word, I speak English, this language is an active crime scene.
I’m doing some world building (and later also writing) and I’m trying to figure out what makes sense.
The basic premise is that there are two main paths to power. Magic and divinity. Both of which also have personifications, but that’s not important right now.
I wanna ask you about what the difference between those two is, in your opinion.
Example: for me, I feel like divinity would be something that’s mostly inborn while magic is something most anyone can learn but needs dedication.
I’d greatly appreciate it if you could go into as much detail as possible
Bruce is one of the richest men in the world. Bruce does not want to be one of the richest men in world.
He starts by implementing high starting salaries and full health care coverages for all levels at Wayne Enterprises. This in vastly improves retention and worker productivity, and WE profits soar. He increases PTO, grants generous parental and family leave, funds diversity initiatives, boosts salaries again. WE is ranked “#1 worker-friendly corporation”, and productively and profits soar again.
Ok, so clearly investing his workers isn’t the profit-destroying doomed strategy his peers claim it is. Bruce is going to keep doing it obviously (his next initiative is to ensure all part-time and contractors get the same benefits and pay as full time employees), but he is going to have to find a different way to dump his money.
But you know what else is supposed to be prohibitively expensive? Green and ethical initiatives. Yes, Bruce can do that. He creates and fund a 10 year plan to covert all Wayne facilities to renewable energy. He overhauls all factories to employ the best environmentally friendly practices and technologies. He cuts contracts with all suppliers that engage in unethical employment practices and pays for other to upgrade their equipment and facilities to meet WE’s new environmental and safety requirements. He spares no expense.
Yeah, Wayne Enterprises is so successful that they spin off an entire new business arm focused on helping other companies convert to environmentally friendly and safe practices like they did in an efficient, cost effective, successful way.
Admittedly, investing in his own company was probably never going to be the best way to get rid of his wealth. He slashes his own salary to a pittance (god knows he has more money than he could possibly know what to do with already) and keeps investing the profits back into the workers, and WE keeps responding with nearly terrifying success.
So WE is a no-go, and Bruce now has numerous angry billionaires on his back because they’ve been claiming all these measures he’s implementing are too expensive to justify for decades and they’re finding it a little hard to keep the wool over everyone’s eyes when Idiot Softheart Bruice Wayne has money spilling out his ears. BUT Bruce can invest in Gotham. That’ll go well, right?
Gotham’s infrastructure is the OSHA anti-Christ and even what little is up to code is constantly getting destroyed by Rogue attacks. Surely THAT will be a money sink.
Except the only non-corrupt employer in Gotham city is….Wayne Enterprises. Or contractors or companies or businesses that somehow, in some way or other, feed back to WE. Paying wholesale for improvement to Gotham’s infrastructure somehow increases WE’s profits.
Bruce funds a full system overhaul of Gotham hospital (it’s not his fault the best administrative system software is WE—he looked), he sets up foundations and trusts for shelters, free clinics, schools, meal plans, day care, literally anything he can think of.
Gotham continues to be a shithole. Bruce Wayne continues to be richer than god against his Batman-ingrained will.
Oh, and Bruice Wayne is no longer viewed as solely a spoiled idiot nepo baby. The public responds by investing in WE and anything else he owns, and stop doing this, please.
Bruce sets up a foundation to pay the college tuition of every Gotham citizen who applies. It’s so successful that within 10 years, donations from previous recipients more than cover incoming need, and Bruce can’t even donate to his own charity.
But by this time, Bruce has children. If he can’t get rid of his wealth, he can at least distribute it, right?
Except Dick Grayson absolutely refuses to receive any of his money, won’t touch his trust fund, and in fact has never been so successful and creative with his hacking skills as he is in dumping the money BACK on Bruce. Jason died and won’t legally resurrect to take his trust fund. Tim has his own inherited wealth, refuses to inherit more, and in fact happily joins forces with Dick to hack accounts and return whatever money he tries to give them. Cass has no concept of monetary wealth and gives him panicked, overwhelmed eyes whenever he so much as implies offering more than $100 at once. Damian is showing worrying signs of following in his precious Richard’s footsteps, and Babs barely allows him to fund tech for the Clocktower. At least Steph lets him pay for her tuition and uses his credit card to buy unholy amounts of Batburger. But that is hardly a drop in the ocean of Bruce’s wealth. And she won’t even accept a trust fund of only one million.
Jason wins for best-worst child though because he currently runs a very lucrative crime empire. And although he pours the vast, vast majority of his profits back into Crime Alley, whenever he gets a little too rich for his tastes, he dumps the money on Bruce. At this point, Bruce almost wishes he was being used for money laundering because then he’s at least not have the money.
So children—generous, kindhearted, stubborn till the day they die the little shits, children—are also out.
Bruce was funding the Justice League. But then finances were leaked, and the public had an outcry over one man holding so much sway over the world’s superheroes (nevermind Bruce is one of those superheroes—but the public can’t know that). So Bruce had to do some fancy PR trickery, concede to a policy of not receiving a majority of funds from one individual, and significantly decrease his contributions because no one could match his donations.
At his wits end, Bruce hires a team of accounts to search through every crinkle and crevice of tax law to find what loopholes or shortcuts can be avoided in order to pay his damn taxes to the MAX.
The results are horrifying. According to the strictest definition of the law, the government owes him money.
Bruce burns the report, buries any evidence as deeply as he can, and organizes a foundation to lobby for FAR higher taxation of the upper class.
All this, and Wayne Enterprises is happily chugging along, churning profit, expanding into new markets, growing in the stock market, and trying to force the credit and proportionate compensation on their increasingly horrified CEO.
Bruce Wayne is one of the richest men in the world. Bruce Wayne will never not be one of the richest men in the world.
But by GOD is he trying.
OP, I’m going to give you the highest compliment I can give to a writer: This reads like what you’d get if Terry Pratchett had ever written a Moist von Lipwig Discworld novel about Batman
You are objectively correct! And I am stunned I didn’t see it!!! Omfg
ok so I decided to customize my ringtones n such and when I saw the edit thing for my alarm sound I was like Okay I Got This so I decided to start playing my main alarm sound and holy fuck I flinched a lot while listening
what the shit
why does this happen
does my brain just have a signal for Oh Shit It’s Time To Wake The Fuck Up when it hears a certain sound or
cuz like. I’m awake. very much so. but my body just fucking convulses when it hears that damn alarm
some people are subverting “no offence, but” by saying “full offence, but” and i want the next step to be taking that “asking for a friend, teehee” thing and just saying “asking for myself” instead.
commenting “What’s the source? Asking for a friend.” on a yiff post: embarrassing. goes at least 3 winks and nods too deep. you know that i know that you’re asking for yourself and pretending you don’t know isn’t cute anymore.
commenting “What’s the source? Asking for myself.” on a yiff post: king behavior, owns yourself and your twisted desires, clarifying specifically that you are *not* extricating your eccentricities onto an imagined 2nd party, even as a joke. husband material.
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