Val, ambiguous 20s, they/them *cracks knuckles* good omens, merlin, bnha/mha, dragon age, avatar: the last airbender, the hobbit, harry potter, stargate, star trek, star wars, B5, B99, elementary, and marvel and DC I guess but ya'll on thin heckin' ice (no queue we die like men)
quick are you mythologizing sex again? are you making it seem like a special category of human behavior rather than just a thing people do? are you forgetting that it can be silly or fun or simply pedestrian? are you forgetting that it requires conversation and negotiation just like every other human activity that involves other people?
things that are extremely normal to say and do not kill the mood or remove the romance or anything:
hey do you want to have sex tonight/tomorrow/later this week?
would you like it if I say x during sex?
do you want to put on some music?
hold on, let me look up how to tie that knot again.
can we change positions? this one isn’t great for my back/arm/whatever.
I don’t want to put on like 2014 Sex Positive Educator Voice but like I promise it’s not that special or scary and you don’t have to completely change your behavior to have sex, it’s normal and healthy to talk about it and negotiate and figure things out as you go. and when I see people say things like “I feel like it would be weird to stop and put on music/adjust positions/etc” I feel like that’s part of mythologizing sex? like there’s not some magical mood that you will ruin by speaking up or making some adjustments or setting something up. it’s okay I swear.
if I may, I wanna add a specific example: confirming consent
asking if things are okay, if they like something you’re doing, stuff like that
I’ve had others worry about me because “in the heat of the moment no one says that stuff” and I say that’s garbage because it happens. so say that stuff. I encourage it. caring about someone else’s safety/comfort will never “kill the mood”
“if you see someone shoplifting, no you didn’t” no but like. i really didn’t. i have never in my life seen someone shoplifting because i’m not watching anyone else in the grocery store..? how are y'all noticing things like that. my only goals are enter the store, survive, exit the store
I wonder if work just.. got harder in the 2000s, comparatively.
So like… ok. I haven’t researched this and I’m mostly thinking out loud, so forgive me.
I entered the working world in 2005. I had a few odd jobs for a few years and then finally just bit the bullet in 2009, got a job at a grocery storeas an inventory clerk. My job was to count surplus items in the backroom and update the counts. Additional responsibilities included helping stock the front end. I left that job in less than a year.
A friend of mine now works at the same chain, different location, same job title, in 2022. But where I shared that title with two other people, he’s the only one with that job title. Additionally, there are less stockpersons, and he is often called out to the floor to help them, which impedes his primary job function. He is also expected to clean bathrooms and some other maintenance things that I cant imagine doing as an inventory clerk.
And I thought maybe it was just that his location is understaffed, but looking back on the past few years where I was expected to do everything (be the front end, the dispatcher, the manufacturer, the teacher, trainer, janitor, delivery driver, account handler… christ, how did I do all this?) I’m looking at the issue with fresh eyes.
I hear sometimes about the ‘slim down,’ where a lot of companies took on a trend of hiring less people than they need to cut down on the cost of labor, and I look at how fast a person can burn out at a job. And how many jobs are considered 'high pressure sales’ when they dont need to be.
Like I’m looking at the possibility of starting a business and I’m looking at the jobs I’ve had that burned me out and why. And it’s almost always been 'I was always juggling responsibilities because we needed more staff’.
Like it seemed like I was doing everything, but getting paid the same.
And I think about that backroom job, where occasionally i would have to help out the stockers on big days, but mostly my job was one function.
It’s not like that anymore, is it?
So when I hear someone bemoan that 'no one wants to work anymore’ I just think… y'know, work ain’t what it used to be. When you’re working the work of 3.5 people because someone at corporate decided it was right and good to hire less people than they need because it saves them 20$ per hour per store, but you still dint get your bonus because shrinks too high or they didnt make the amount of money they thought they would or you gave too many coupons ONCE. And it’s like they’re actively trying to chase people away, and then threaten you with automation but they do t make work attractive enough for people to show…
Work dont want no one anymore.
Oh damn, the notes on this. Apparently it’s not my imagination and y'all have lived some horror stories.
I feel like we should be able to do something about this. Like we should be able to say 'no’ to lean staffing and we should have a say in what our responsibilities are.
I’m thinking about all the times i should have just straight up said something. Like I think I had it in my head that if I took on all the responsibilities in the shop, eventually I would be rewarded with higher pay. But it doesnt work like that anymore. The reward for digging the best hole is a bigger shovel.
That’s no way to live, though. And I just put up with it like it was normal to be so tired at the end of the day that I couldnt move. Maybe I should have just said 'no, you do it’ when they started making me work outside my title.
Because that took a serious toll on my mental health.
I HAVE A UNION JOB AND LET ME TELL YOU SOME THINGS
It is part time, contract, hourly, full remote. Because it’s union? They have to offer me a minimum of 25 hours a week. If I *voluntarily* go under, that is on me, but they ALWAYS offer me up to that. If I ask for the hours, they HAVE to give them.
Overtime doesn’t trigger until 40 hrs/wk… but any time spent on emails, spreadsheets, my timesheet, ANY admin task that’s more than 15 min? I can bill for that. ALL training, meetings, etc? I bill for that.
I get holiday pay. Seperate from vacation, sick leave, personal time; if it’s a federal or state holiday I *automatically* get 5 hours of pay for that day. Period. Unlimited. I got paid 5 hours to do nothing on MLK day and presidents day, no questions asked, nothing taken away from my other pay.
I get sick leave, vacation leave, “personal” leave (anything that isn’t the former two – like, “my friend had an accident and I need to drive them home”). I get health insurance, dental insurance, life insurance. I get access to the credit union. I get access to job search help if my position gets dissolved / I get laid off!
It costs about $80/month in union dues, but I MORE than get that back in terms of benefits and peace of mind, and it’s automatically deducted from my paycheck.
U N I O N S.
as we are living through a new resurgence in unions, after they were systematically decimated for decades, people might ask ‘how do i join a union?’ or ‘how do i unionize my workplace?’. the IWW isn’t a union union in the sense that it will automatically give you benefits like the above. BUT it is the single best place to start if you want to begin unionizing your workplace, connecting with other workers (including prisoners), and generally learn about unions and the international labor struggle.
Whenever unions being destroyed comes up, some asshat’s always like “but the duuuues” like, STFU. I’d HAPPILY pay the dues to not be fuckin exploited.
The slim down has affected everything. It’s why most of the movie theaters around me are nasty, the retail stores are always a trainwreck, and you constantly have long wait times at restaurants and grocery stores. It’s the captains, NOT the crew.
We were waiting for tires at Walmart, and they’d called someone to a section on intercom a buncha times and some ol fart customer was so offended “Why don’t they send a MANAGER there???” WOMAN. It’s WALMART. They do not hire the goddamn people! I get unreasonably pissed about this cuz too many people have no idea what work is actually like now and make dumbass complaints and harass workers, bitching at the wrong thing.
Food service has gotten way worse thank staffing slim downs, ghost kitchens and online ordering. Seriously, look up the ghost kitchens. Tons of big chains try to pass off hokey “local” sounding food on grub hub and door dash that comes straight outta IHOP and Applebee’s. It leaves the people working those restaurants effectively running numerous restaraunts of the same kitchen for single restaraunt pay. Ghost Kitchens have come under serious litigation in Houston specifically for having such poorly maintained spaces, workers have gotten seriously hurt.
It is so fucked how we’re conditioned into saying yes to everything till you end up doing 5 people’s work under the false promise of a better future. It burned my careers and bridges to the ground. Don’t make my mistakes. I’m hopeful that GenZ and the rest of the up and comers will continue to take less bullshit at work and justifiably cry on TikTok behind the service counter cuz work is NOT working.
More Perfect Union is an excellent YouTube channel doing fantastic labor journalism that I can’t recommend enough.
So, “lean staffing” was mentioned above. Not only do I hate the practice, I hate the term… calling it “lean” implies that what you cut away was fat. That it was healthier for it. But what you cut was SLACK. And slack is what allows lines to tighten without breaking. I call it “taut” staffing. A taut line is a line under strain. Strain too long, and it breaks. Increase the tension and it breaks. A taut line is one that cannot absorb changes.
re: that last post, ive said it before and ill say it again: no one deserves to die (deserving is fake and death is bad) but some people need to be stopped and choose to make death the only way to stop them
I disagree. Pedophiles 100% deserve death.
you are moralizing and weaponizing your disgust in order to construct and justify a category of person you’re allowed to murder
what do you think you deserve for this?
Sorry, no person deserves to die, thankfully child molesters and pedophiles aren’t human, so this doesnt apply to them.
denying the humanity of people who do horrible things accomplishes exactly three things:
give cover to people who haven’t been caught yet by allowing them to use their humanity as “proof” of their innocence
silence any criticism of societal structures and institutions that facilitate those horrible things by putting the focus on individuals who are assumed to be so uniquely monstrous that the ways it was made easy for them are irrelevant
provide a shortcut to dehumanize anyone you feel like killing: simply accuse them of doing a horrible thing
3.a. if you’ve already established that only an inhuman monster could kill a child, then all you have to do to get people to burn down the jewish quarter is say that jews kidnap christian children to bathe in their blood
3.b. if you’ve already established that only an inhuman monster could commit rape, then all you have to do to get people to string up a black man you don’t like is find a white woman who’s willing to point at him while she cries and babbles
3.c. if you’ve already established that only an inhuman monster could molest a child, then all you have to do to get people to drag gay people behind their trucks is say that since gay people can’t have babies, the only way they can make more gay people is by following a nefarious Agenda to “convert” children by molesting them
3.c.a. meanwhile if you try to address the rampant sexual assault of catholic altar boys, you’re met with “don’t be ridiculous, he’s a priest!” (see #1) and with assertions that even if it does happen sometimes, those priests are just infiltrators who don’t represent the church and there’s no reason to make sure priests and altar boys are never alone together (see #2)
tl;dr: your disgust-based violent politics are not less reactionary than any run-of-the-mill homophobe or racist’s disgust-based violent politics
I realized how bad of a take this was after I added my last bit, i apologize for the idiocy i portrayed in my half thought out statements. And I appreciate the way you rebutted this with reasonable statements rather than going hog wild because I said something you didnt agree with.
hey no worries. we’ve all been there, and anyone who says they havent is either 11 or afraid of their social circle
unlearning our kneejerk reactions is a process, and it’s not a linear one. its good to practice thinking before we post, but sometimes thinking after we post just has to be good enough
Okay, this made me pause and literally write out every letter that ‘fell’ in order (‘oomngouuhhrsrtutpntnue’), then make sure they were all contained in 'turntomushuponthergroun’.
They are, and it’s very satisfying.
coincidentally, “oomngouuhhrsrtutpntnue” is the sound I make when it’s autumn
I love how you can use the environment in baldur’s gate.
for instance, I got my ass completely handed to me in a battle, so on my second attempt I piled barrels of gunpowder & wine near where the enemies would run out, and had one of my guys posed with a fire spell to ignite them. and THIS TIME, I triggered a massive explosion on my first turn of combat, instantly killing my entire party.
ALT
