So many people who claim to care about trans issues will see conservative transphobes rave about “cutting off healthy breast tissue” and “girls mutilating themselves,” rage or clown on male pregnancy, constantly share post-op photos of top surgery scars and phallo skin grafts to illicit outrage, transvestigate male celebrities to “prove he’s secretly a woman”–and then turn around and declare that the Right forgets that trans men and mascs exist. I’m so tired of it.
You have my promise that if I ever become insanely rich I will immediately purchase a private island and start hiring evil henchmen to build me a device that can turn off the sun
Well obviously they won’t be men after prolonged exposure to my base’s estrogenizing background radiation, come on
Customer started yelling at me because I was 1 minute late to open the shop so I banned him from shopping with us and locked the door on him. Play stupid games.
This man had the audacity to come back at the end of the day as I was closing up by the fucking way. Ranting and raving about how he had been mistreated and that no one had even bothered to reply to his complaint email all day
Well I had the UNBRIDLED joy of informing him that not only had I seen his email, which was insanely abusive towards me for the crime of being 1 minute late and not putting up with his shit first thing in the morning, but that I was also the manager who he demanded to speak to, and I’d now also had our IT team block his IP address from being able to contact us or order with us ever again.
I should’ve been allowed to castrate the man but this will have to do
Okay this got way more notes than I was expecting so I feel like I should add some important context here. I’m not management. I’m not even middle management I’m just some guy that works here. I don’t have the authority to do any of this I just like lying to customers
saying “you are a burden on society” is just such a weird framing of priorities
It’s like saying “wow, think how much better gas mileage your car would get if you weren’t sitting in it” or “think how dry that umbrella would be if you weren’t holding it in between you and the rainstorm”.
the things we create? they’re for us. they are meant to carry us. they are meant to protect us. we are meant to hold them up to keep us dry.
why do we even have a society if not to take care of each other?
I just liked someones post from 2023 with 1 singular note. I hope they see that and are reminded of their past self. i hope they are frightened because who tf is liking a frankly quite boring post from two years ago with, previously, 1 note? i hope they are scared of me. i hope they are active on tumblr and are reminded of the times they did not know how to post, and are scared and embarrassed and laugh a little.
For those who don’t understand, EBT are food stamps (government money for buying food for low-income people). Because the money is from the government, it comes with horrific restrictions, one of which is you cannot buy “prepared” food with it. You can only buy raw chicken, not cooked chicken, for example.
This kitchen is getting around that stupid rule by selling you raw, unprepared chicken, and then charging your EBT account for raw, unprepared chicken.
Then as a side thing, totally unrelated, they cook the chicken for free. Since you bought raw chicken with the EBT, it’s legal. There’s no law against cooking people’s raw chicken for free for them. That’s just charity.
This kitchen is a blessing to anyone who doesn’t have a kitchen of their own.
Ah yes, prepared food, the thing that of course poor people would have no reason to buy. Everyone knows that people living in poverty are guaranteed to have infinite free time and energy, access to an equipped and functional kitchen, and be free from disabilities that affect their ability to cook. Poor people never have unreliable gas or electricity, are never struggling to feed multiple dependents, and just live for the chance to come home from ten hours of underpaid work to spend another hour in the kitchen cooking. Excluding prepared food from benefits makes SO much sense, it’s not like that’s the demographic who needs it the most or anything. We gotta make their lives as hard as possible so they’ll choose not to be poor.
an appalling number of marginalized people in this upcoming generation appear to be under the impression that saying they’re “reclaiming” a slur gives them a free pass to use that slur in a derogatory way towards other marginalized people in their communities that they dislike or think are annoying. maybe it’s just the people i’ve had the misfortune of encountering in the wild, but it’s getting bleak out there, folks.
like the other day i encountered some cunt using the fucking R slur to refer to an autistic person stimming in a way they found annoying, and when confronted about their ableism, they replied, “oh, i have ADHD, i can reclaim it.” and it’s like, no, you jackass, you absolutely the fuck cannot! that is not what that means! if the way you use a word is indistinguishable from the way a fucking nazi would use that word, then you’re not “reclaiming it” anymore, you dumb bastard!!! you’re just using it the same way the damn nazi does!!! shut the fuck up and be kinder you ass!!!
Reclaiming a slur means applying it to yourselves as a badge of honor. It needs to be used with a positive connotation. That is what reclaiming means!
If you are not talking about yourself, it is not reclamation.
If you are not talking about the group kindly, it is not reclamation.
You reclaim a word by making it from a weapon into a way to connect with your own community positively. That is what reclamation means.
an appalling number of marginalized people in this upcoming generation appear to be under the impression that saying they’re “reclaiming” a slur gives them a free pass to use that slur in a derogatory way towards other marginalized people in their communities that they dislike or think are annoying. maybe it’s just the people i’ve had the misfortune of encountering in the wild, but it’s getting bleak out there, folks.
like the other day i encountered some cunt using the fucking R slur to refer to an autistic person stimming in a way they found annoying, and when confronted about their ableism, they replied, “oh, i have ADHD, i can reclaim it.” and it’s like, no, you jackass, you absolutely the fuck cannot! that is not what that means! if the way you use a word is indistinguishable from the way a fucking nazi would use that word, then you’re not “reclaiming it” anymore, you dumb bastard!!! you’re just using it the same way the damn nazi does!!! shut the fuck up and be kinder you ass!!!
Reclaiming a slur means applying it to yourselves as a badge of honor. It needs to be used with a positive connotation. That is what reclaiming means!
If you are not talking about yourself, it is not reclamation.
If you are not talking about the group kindly, it is not reclamation.
You reclaim a word by making it from a weapon into a way to connect with your own community positively. That is what reclamation means.
an appalling number of marginalized people in this upcoming generation appear to be under the impression that saying they’re “reclaiming” a slur gives them a free pass to use that slur in a derogatory way towards other marginalized people in their communities that they dislike or think are annoying. maybe it’s just the people i’ve had the misfortune of encountering in the wild, but it’s getting bleak out there, folks.
like the other day i encountered some cunt using the fucking R slur to refer to an autistic person stimming in a way they found annoying, and when confronted about their ableism, they replied, “oh, i have ADHD, i can reclaim it.” and it’s like, no, you jackass, you absolutely the fuck cannot! that is not what that means! if the way you use a word is indistinguishable from the way a fucking nazi would use that word, then you’re not “reclaiming it” anymore, you dumb bastard!!! you’re just using it the same way the damn nazi does!!! shut the fuck up and be kinder you ass!!!
Reclaiming a slur means applying it to yourselves as a badge of honor. It needs to be used with a positive connotation. That is what reclaiming means!
If you are not talking about yourself, it is not reclamation.
If you are not talking about the group kindly, it is not reclamation.
You reclaim a word by making it from a weapon into a way to connect with your own community positively. That is what reclamation means.
due to the moisture in the air just about everywhere in the world, even continuous oiling and waxing was not entirely sufficient to prevent the rusting of armour. because of this, sand and vinegar came in great handy for the removal of rust. even still, fabric that came into contact with the rust would be stained, and because armour was worn with specialised clothing, that clothing needed regular maintenance as well.
THIS, writers. Unless your characters are very wealthy (can pay people to be very industrious in growing, spinning, weaving, sewing on their behalf) or live in a post-textile-industrial-revolution world (aka modern/futuristic), they’re not going to have that many clothes.
What they will have is protective outerwear. Aprons are a very real necessity for a lot of jobs, from cooking to blacksmithing and beyond.
Women wore aprons and housecoats into the 1940s and 1950s when doing cooking & cleaning because it was still a bit expensive to own a lot of clothes…so this is within 100 years. Within living memory for many folks.
Coveralls were created to protect clothing, and were handed out as uniforms by factories because the workers complained that their own clothes were getting damaged by their workplace. (Unions helped with this, strongly encouraging the companies doing the damage to their regular clothes to step up with replacement garments that could get damaged and then replaced by the company whose work was damaging them.)
Businesses started having their employees wear uniforms to make them look good and as a signature of their company (UPS brown, for example), but unless the design teams are idiots, those outfits are going to be stitched in ways that you can move easily & comfortably while doing your assigned tasks.
In corporate culture in Japan, the salarywomen are often given a uniform dress to wear, and I know of one business that held a work-slowdown because the way the sleeves of those dresses were cut and stitched, they literally couldn’t bring their arms forward to type on their computers in a comfortable way. The company balked at replacing the uniforms, until a section manager agreed to let his female workers wear their own “office-dressy” clothes for a day…and productivity leaped forward by over 200%, literally because they could move their arms and position them comfortably.
Another example of those who effed it up are the officers’ uniforms for the Germans during WWII, which were focused on looking fashionable–and they were!–but were horrible to don quickly, awkward wear in actual combat, etc, and it took them far too long to “drop trousers” to use the bushes in a swift, efficient, and safe manner. (Not saying they didn’t deserve to be shot for supporting such an evil regime, but you should be able to go to the bathroom without worrying that it’ll take you over a minute to put your clothes back together enough to run for cover in summer.)
Prior to the 1700s, servants in manor houses & noble estates often did not wear a uniform; they just wore whatever they had, and depended on aprons and watchcoats and whatever to protect their clothes. Then it became a status symbol to put one’s servants into uniforms, also known as livery. If you could afford to do that then, by gum-golly, you were wealthy, and people could literally see that you were wealthy!
As for those famous black maid’s dresses with white aprons that every manga loves to draw? Black dye was still a bit expensive, but black hid most stains. White aprons were protective, and were to be changed out frequently…and it was far easier to bleach cloth than it was to dye it black, plus the stark contrast was very eye-catching, and since the aprons could be swapped out frequently (very small amount of cloth compared to a whole dress), the fact that your maidstaff were wearing clean aprons was another sign of how wealthy you were, rather than just making the maid wear the apron all day long, progressively getting dirtier and dirtier.
With all this said, how valuable clothing was also affected how armies moved. Throughout most of recorded history, armies were composed primarily of men…but there were almost always 2 categories of women who followed them on the campaign trail. One, of course, was sex workers (for obvious reasons), but the other was Laundresses…and the laundresses would be ransomed first, ahead of the sex workers, if captured by enemy forces. (Not all were women by any means, btw, but the majority were, so I stuck with that gender.)
They worked hard to get the clothing clean, helped with getting leather armor clean, and provided other grooming services such as lice-combing. “But Jean, why would getting the soldiers’ clothing clean be that important?” Dudes, dudes, my dudes…if you need to take a piss or a shit, combat will not stop for you. Peristalsis will happen mid-sword-swing. This was one of the sources of “deadly infections killed many of the fighters who went to war,” and laundresses literally cleaned that shit up.
When you’re a warrior in an army, marching off through the forests of Gaul, you can only carry so many spare sets of clothes because you’re also carrying your armor, your weapons, and your rations, etc, etc. You will want to take care of your clothes, because you don’t have many replacements, and you won’t get many replacements.
So, writers, when you’re writing about pre-industrialized cultures…go easy on how many clothes people own. Also realize that accessorizing can make an old outfit look new, which includes small parts of the clothing that can be swapped out for other pieces in a mix-and-match style.
…One last note:
The most expensive, time-consuming part of building a Norse ship to go a-viking on wasn’t the actual ship, which took many men 2+ years to craft. It was the sails, which took many people, males and females, 3+ years to spin and weave and stitch together. There are literal stories of brash sailors robbing other norsemen of their sails because thieving it was faster & easier. (It also explains a lot of the fury of certain blood feuds between clans & holdings, if you think about it.)
Bringing this back to writers again, your period fantasy or historic characters are also going to know how to do upkeep and basic repairs on their own clothing. Laundries and tailors might be a thing in their world, but spot-cleaning and being able to mend small tears before they become big ones is crucial when off doing quests or campaigns or world-saving missions or what have you. Garments are expensive to replace. It may be sexy to have your hero discard their bloody, torn, and ruined shirt after a fight, but even if the garment is ruined beyond repair or wearability, woven cloth is still so valuable that it’s worth keeping and cleaning to be turned into something else (legwraps, bandages, resewn into a hat, or used as patches to repair other garments, etc.).
We live in an unprecedented era of wastefulness, where our clothing is often so cheap (and cheaply made) that it’s barely worth the efgort of repairing once it begins to wear out, and so easy to replace that we end up amassing more than we need of it. Even less than a hundred years ago, this kind of frivolity was reserved for the EXCEPTIONALLY wealthy. Even fairly well off people would continually recycle their old garments again and again. (Think of Cinderella’s mice making that old pink dress into something new with just bits and pieces of the sisters’ discarded accessories…. taking ribbons or lace or whole sections of an old dress to use in a new one was very common until quite recently!)
And never underestimate the usefulness of rags. If the clothing is beyond all repair or salvage, it has a new life as rags. You can wrap food in them, stuff them in your shoes for warmth and fit, pad your pillow with them, use them for cleaning, for bandages, for tying and belting your drawers, for patches…. rags are invaluable in a world where paper towels and disposable hygiene products do not exist.
The thing about reclaiming slurs is that once you’ve been affectionally called ‘faggot’ by friends, loved ones, and amiable fellows on the internet for long enough, you almost forget that it means something else to people who hate you.
Honestly at this point if a stranger on the street yelled “hey faggot!” after me, I’d probably turn around like “what?” like they’d just casually called me by name, and they were only trying to get my attention because they wanted to tell me something, before processing that they’re being hostile.
That is the wettest sounding bat I’ve ever heard. :’)
In fairness Australia does actually have “bat rabies” so you should still be careful handling bats, but it’s a lot more controllable than normal rabies (which we do not have). This person clearly knows what they’re doing though.
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
