[insert witty subtitle here]

yeah yeah you’re an unknowable eldritch monsterfucker gender beast but are you normal about feminism

Fun Fact for new readers: The vampire women are never referred to by the book as “brides”—the whole “Brides of Dracula” name for them doesn’t show up until a good 3+ decades later.

That being considered, I invite you to conceptualize them as Dracula’s Roommates with me, who refuse to do any chores and keep trying to eat his food out of the fridge.

ala rat de cacti

Oh! They screm

im becoming the first (i guess?) daisy oak x oc shipper and by god will i make all them normie pokemon fans who are like "errrmmm didnt know green had a sister" know who daisy truly is lmao lets GO. say hi to her gf and my pookie taiga who will become real in kanto 2 ^_^

green is in for a surprise when he returns from alola. this 2 meters tall cave woman whos walked the earth with a trusty bear and who enjoys all that fucked up food from a nordic region shows exceptional skill when it comes to helping others improve their relationship with their pokemon and so finds her way to daisy's heart. under daisy's training at their shining sparkling new salon, she learns to make any pokemon cute too as a trustworthy massager with a big smile!

taiga will become less Red But Woman the more she lives inside my head, i can for now say that as much as nanatai is a couple of very refined women with a blooming business, they probably are quite literally like spongebob and patrick outside work hours.

kantrio is involved in her endeavors for sure. more backstory i will probably have come up in 2043 see you then.

there are actually only 2 movie genres. the ones where u have to remain completely silent throughout the whole film, and the ones where u have to comment on whatevers happening on screen every 5 minutes

@thelibraryiscool is correct

Routes where high-speed rail would be faster than both car or airplane.

Philosophers:

people keep trying to make "ladies and gentlemen" more inclusive.

I think we should go the other way around.

make more and more weird false dichotomies in greetings. "gamers and pianists". "oil painters and swordsmen". "vexillologists and entomologists". "chess masters and diamond artificers". "accountants and gendered individuals".

we need to be dropping shit into formal meetings to make people say "wait what? which one am I?"

I have started referring to my students as “critters and creatures.” I then offer them the option to decide where on the critter–creature spectrum they think they belong. They enjoy this immensely. I teach some critters, some creatures, some 50/50s, some critters with creature tendencies, some creatures with critter inclinations.

all i have to say is 'hello cowards' and it shuts gendering up

absolutely no one:

Madeline L’Engle, writing a wrinkle in time at some point in the early 1960s: what are kids into these days? comparative religious studies and theoretical physics, right? Yeah?

Whenever I run into people--people who are apparently well-intentioned and trying to be kind and moral--who honestly think that there was no widespread antisemitism before the Nazis, all I can think of is this:

The Wikipedia page for "Timeline of Antisemitism" is so long that they had to give the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries their own subpages for reasons of length, and the 20th century subpage is not inclusive for the Holocaust, which has its own timeline subpage.

But so many people think that antisemitism was invented by the Nazis, and solved by the Allies. And I just want to shake them and educate them.

One of the many axes I have to grind with my education is the fact that American history classes act like Adolph Hitler invented antisemitism whole cloth in the 30s.

Centuries of pogroms and church sponsored hate laid the groundwork for the Holocaust. Heck, everyone targeted by the Nazi regime had some kind of preexisting cultural bias against them that the Nazis just exploited.

Don't forget that Hitler explicitly based the Nuremberg Laws (which stripped Jews of their citizenship in Germany based on Blood Quantum) on American laws regarding tribal affiliation, and his "Lebensraum" Doctrine (living space) was likewise directly inspired by American Manifest Destiny. There's a lot that American education shuffles under the rug in order to paint themselves as the "Good Guys".

...as a Jew I honestly thought everyone knew this. So, if you didn’t, now you do.

There was one moment a few years back, where I was describing my experiences with antisemitism to @kalessinsdaughter, and I got back a horrified silence after describing something that, to me, was routine. Her reaction, after she recovered, was that nobody should have to deal with what I and other Jews have to deal with in terms of antisemitic harassment and cruelty. To which I replied that it wasn't extreme or that terrible; the person responsible hadn't used slurs, called for my death, or engaged in Nazi apologia, after all. By the standards of antisemites, they were practically polite.

After my response, there was another horrified silence, and then the response to the effect of, "The fact that you can say that at all says how bad it is."

To which I agreed, but it's like complaining about the weather, right? Or a fish trying to understand the concept of "wet".

Which led us down a metaphorical rabbit hole, and now we call those moments, "Polluted Fish Moments". Unpacking that, to a fish raised in polluted water, the pollution is normal, while to other fish, it's horrifying and toxic.

absolutely stole this idea here is the original comic by silkentine!!

Libraries run on statistics.

Every question I am asked gets a tick mark, and gets recorded at the end of the day.

Every book you take off the shelf? Don't reshelve it yourself... there's often a cart for "count use" or similar statistic... "This book wasn't checked out, which is automatically recorded, but it was used."

Check out not just books, but ebooks, movies, and anything we have to offer. I always say "the best thing about libraries is, if you don't like it, return it and all you've lost is time." Want to hate-read a conservative pundit's book? Check it out. Willing to wait for a movie to come to video? We got DVDs. On the go and want something to read or listen to? I can check books out of my local library on my phone from several states away. I've had "The Complete Tales of Peter Rabbit and Friends" on eaudiobook for pretty close to four years straight, because my daughter goes to sleep with it (and demands it if I don't have it).

If you want a book at another location in a big system? Put it on hold, so it will come to you (unless you need it RIGHT NOW). If we don't have it? Ask that we buy it. Show an interest and we might have space in the budget.

Ask about and use our databases. We get credit for click-throughs. You are already paying (pennies) for them.

Ask about our system for compliments from the public. Use that system to praise individual staff (especially me), and libraries that you love. As a manager, if I have positive letters from the public, I can better justify high review scores for my staff.

Go to programs. Ask for programs you want. Popular programs show the library is used. Tomorrow, I have a couple who have asked for some basic computer instruction... that's a program.

Vote, especially for people who believe in funding public services. But if your polling location is a public library, even better. And contact your local elections office, and try to get libraries made polling places... increased foot traffic helps non-library users become library users.

If your library has one, join your Friends of the Library group. I know our friends group is aging, so even if all you can do is schlep boxes for their book sale, it's a big help.

The more you participate in, and use your library, the more we can justify budget increases to improve services.

i think this is probably true of every office, but there's a middle aged woman working in business who doesn't hold any particular place in the chain of command but is Sovereign. i was running support and she has access to more secure network drives than i do. im pretty sure she has an admin account. i was having trouble with my parking pass and my boss just said to talk to kristen- one day later i had parking in any garage on campus. she's not even in charge of parking in our building

This is also true of academia. In pretty much any department of the university — in my experience at least — there’s a person with a small-but-private office and an unassuming title (probably including a word like “secretary” or “assistant”), usually an older woman, and she actually runs the place. Faculty defer to her; department heads come and go, but Jill has been there for thirty years and knows how everything works, and she’s the person you go to if you want to get anything done. You’ll know her because when a professor directs you to her they won’t say “you need to talk to the Office of So-and-So because this falls under their purview”, but “you need to talk to Jill.” Her official job title is basically irrelevant because her actual role is acting as eminence grise for this whole operation.

I’ve personally had the experience where my advisor told me “you should do such-and-such certification, go talk to Jill,” and I went to talk to Jill & she said “actually you can’t do such-and-such because XYZ,” so I went back to my advisor to relay this, and he just kind of shrugged and was like, “well if Jill says no, then it can’t be done” and that was the end of it. Complete veto power, no higher authority to turn to, because the only reason Jill can’t do something is if it’s literally impossible.

Honestly there’s probably a whole dissertation about invisible labor and gender dynamics in there waiting to be written.

The one in my undergrad department was Linda C, and I think her hypercompetence must have risen to the point of allowing her to manipulate time itself, because in my experience, every time you needed to talk to Ms. C, you would end up chatting with her for at least an hour (which was both enjoyable and informative) and yet she got so much work done--it just didn't seem physically possible.

Take secretaries and administrative assistants out of any organization and you'll see it crumble in no time. They are the holder of the secrets to understanding red tape and other administrative nightmares.

The whole project of corporate IT was trying to get rid of this type of person and it's why nothing works anymore and we're all dying

one of the most important things i’ve learned in therapy is that when you’ve experienced prolonged trauma in your childhood, pleasure feels uncomfortable. like, not that you don’t feel it, but that when you do feel it there’s an impulse to make it stop, because it’s extremely unfamiliar. and pleasure can mean many things, as simple as feeling cozy, and as complex as feeling loved. the neural pathways for feeling good have not had a chance to develop, and the neural pathways for feeling bad are quite practiced. feeling good, too, takes conscious practice.

hey sorry if i was offputting and strange and bizarre and weird as fuck last night i was just being myself

there is no 'base accent' so like all of this is entirely subjective tbc, just based on what people around you say and how you think you sound

pick whichever language you want to answer in if you're multi-lingual