peel out the watchword

In light of the situation that happened with my manager, she informed us today that she is planning to move back farther south where her primary community and support system are. I think we all saw this coming; the doctor predicted it like the day after we got the news about what was going on and for privacy's sake I'm not going to expand on it here even if I'm not naming names. It's the kind of situation where nobody would blame her for wanting to no longer live in that house.

She hasn't told her boss yet. The typical situation here is that the assistant manager would take her position and that would potentially put me in as assistant manager since I'm third down from the top, but our assistant manager is not enthusiastic about this idea. He moved up to WA to go to school to be an optometrist, not an optician, but was already kind of talking about moving again maybe in a year or two where there are better schools. They wouldn't promote me to general manager from my position just yet, especially without actual management experience, but I know when I started with this industry I showed a lot of promise and there were conversations had about what I wanted my future to look like. I'm not sure if I am ready to be a manager but I would feel comfortable as assistant.

This then leaves the potential they bring in someone from a different store, which is what I would prefer over an outside hire. The tech and I were talking this evening before they went home about how they're hoping whoever will take our boss's place will still be just as queer friendly and chill with our various disabilities, and that would be ideal. I've become a much more fully embodied worker with this team where I don't have to mask any aspect of my personality with who I'm working with--do you know how rare that is at a job? An outside person isn't going to be able to put that light out, and I already said outright that if they pick someone shitty I am absolutely not afraid to leave. I love my job, but I have a feeling they're going to be hunting for someone who is a lot more aggressively sales focused since we haven't been doing too well.

What we've been trying to tell the higher management is that the demographic of the area we live in is a lot more low income than the newer locations they put out. It's not really much of a secret but part of optical, especially at retail chain locations, is exam conversion: we want you to both get your exam done and also purchases glasses and/or contacts with us the same day. Everybody gets their prescription to take home with them regardless if they actually buy anything or not, but we stay in business when people buy. That's how it is with any retail industry.

Our exam conversion is actually pretty damn good but the average amount of money that people spend is lower than other stores and we don't get a lot of new patients. It was busier the first year this place opened but then they opened three new locations farther south and east and it took patients away because now there was a place closer to them. We've been trying to market up north where there are no other locations but it's a bit more of a schelp, especially now that one of the primary routes to get from city to city is going to be closed down for four months for construction. The area of the city we're in specifically is pretty low income and has one of those stupid reputations for being the "bad" part of town. We've had some of our luxury frames stolen. It's a thing. We have these magnets on the frames but over in one of the newer, more affluent locations, their lux collection has no security tags at all.

Optical is a niche industry and whenever I have my profile set on Indeed to "available to work immediately" I'm often getting messages from people desperate to hire me. Even without a license, I can still start an apprenticeship and be making a lot more pretty much anywhere else. I've stayed here because of the location and the team and I think quietly I've been emotionally preparing for knowing that can always change. I always had a feeling our manager would leave at some point because she also has a more specialized industry she left for this one + makes frequent weekend trips down to Portland for friends and keeping her connections, but the way this is happening is the worst fucking possible way.

literally what do you say when someone close to you texts to say she just found out that two people can now see thanks to a cornea transplant from the person she just lost three weeks ago because anything sounds like it is the wrong answer

I had a thought about what feels inherently soulless about a lot of AI images, especially the ones that are made from prompts and styles stolen from illustrators and it goes back to the origins of Art Vs Artist. If you remember, Art Vs Artist started as a meme with someone saying "has anyone else realized that artists tend to look like their art" so then artists started posting a selfie surrounded by their work and I can kinda see it. It's hard to pinpoint why/how but what I noticed is that it can either be:

There's a screenshot that's making the rounds on twitter from a FB group of artists against generative AI where the guy works for a company that hired a bunch of prompters, and he points out that the new hires don't respond to professional critique well at all and also don't have the eye trained to catch those mistakes and therefore fix them. AI images are overly polished but with rookie mistakes, whereas emerging artists have a rawness in their work where even when there are obvious mistakes with anatomy, shading, whatever... the overall image is still cohesive because a lot of those mistakes and skills develop in tandem with each other. We all started off not knowing how to do anatomy properly, how to do lighting, how to work with colors, but as we keep drawing and developing our styles we improve in those areas sometimes all at the same time. Sometimes you put in a little extra effort in one domain by trying to really work on lineart and anatomy before you focus on color and shading, but once you develop the ability to practice then it gets quicker. You develop ways of learning that don't have to take as long as it used to.

Then you see this overly polished AI images that on a quick glance before you proof them seem fine, and then you just see some weird appendages or lighting that does not make sense. An untrained eye would think it looks clean and professional, but professional level work would not have a mastery of color and have glaring errors in anatomy.

Professionals still make mistakes and stylistic choices, but that's what makes it human. There's a similar concept that you can find sometimes in beadwork where one bead is slightly misaligned with the others in an otherwise perfect row, and that's called the spirit bead. It's meant to be a humbling gesture of our humanity, but when a computer does it there's not enough prompting you can do to force it to recognize the error. The AI training is only as good as the eye that is looking at it, and when they don't have the trained eye to see the errors, they can never fix it and learn.

I don't say this nearly often enough but I hope that you stick around.

Uh, so I just found out that one of my cousins on the Yurok side is buried in the cemetery that's about ten or so minutes from here. The same god damn cemetery that I was visiting casually to walk around with.

EDIT: correction, for some reason there's an entry on findagrave but there is a separate and more accurate findagrave profile including a photo of her headstone in Tulalip. That makes a lot more sense because I know we have a cousin or two out there.

>cousin attempting to enroll

>tribe says no

>cousin: yo this is my family so I'm appealing

>tribe: we don't know who this family is

MY COUSINS, IVE BEEN GHOSTED MORE TIMES THAN I'VE CONNECTED TO THE TRIBE BECAUSE IVE BEEN AT THIS FOR YEARS AND MAYBE IF YOU RESPONDED YOU'D KNOW WHO WE ARE

really damn weird to calculate the payout my mom got in her "Individual Indian Account" from 1972 dollars to 2024 dollars. It equals almost $5,000 in today's money. Five grand for land loss and genocide.

something that grinds down my patience more and more each day is that what nobody actually comprehends is how intensely propagandized we are in this country and it takes people literal years to try to unlearn that

what you're hating is the united states imperialist machine but the common people of this country are so intensely scrutinized and force fed propaganda about how we are the best and the top country in the whole world from the second that we like, you know, enter any sort of educational system. our voting districts get gerrymandered to hell and back so even when we want change it is intensely difficult to actually rally people together to get shit done. the culture of work here means that brand new parents get maybe like a week off of work to let their bodies recover before they have to go back. how the fuck are we supposed to raise globally aware children when we are forcing our brand new parents back to standing 8+ hours behind a walmart cash register. we know that this culture creep is happening and it is often by force. within smaller circles and communities it is actually quite a common talking point on the hard left where grassroots organizations are constantly being created and slowly worn down.

we hinge on the same political talking points that errupted after a terrorist attack over 20 years ago because it hasn't quite gotten stale for us yet. our military takes full advantage of the fact that they can go to high schools full of teenagers to talk about free college, rope in the kids that are impoverished and feel like they have no future, and then put them into the imperialist machine. we know. we know how fucking bad the government is. you hate them, we hate them, and for those of us that are still trying to de-propagandize every day sorry that we're not doing it faster. you're going to get pissed that we want to know more because it's not your job but then in the same breath criticize us because we don't know what's going on in your part of the world? that is by design. our global stupidity is fully by design and finding accurate sources on AI machines that are designed to still feed us america centric propaganda makes it that much harder to find the accurate information. can you understand that?

EDIT: ACTUALLY I'M NOT DONE, DID WE FUCKING FORGET THAT FOUR YEARS AGO THE PREVIOUS PRESIDENT TRIED TO DESTROY OUR POSTAL SYSTEM?? YOU KNOW, THE THING THAT HELPS PEOPLE VOTE EASIER?

did you know that most of our news sources, including local, are owned by like the same six companies?? i wonder why giant corporate capitalists would be so invested in owning the news broadcasts so we can watch biden keep giving money to israel?? did you know that even when we do vote we can also simply follow the money when we realize the people we voted for after being so intensely propaganized is still voting for genocides and pollution and global destruction? do you really think we don't know that? do you actually think we are that stupid?