Well, you were myth-taken.

crazy that Goncharov (1973) will be 50 years old in a few months because it seems like it just came out yesterday

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.

Okokok. I want to say yes, unionize.

It was actually very easy to join iww and I wish I had done that at my old job sooner. But a lot of the negative rep that unions get really does sink into you and there are times when asking for help seems hopeless.

It's scary. Theres the threat of losing your job. And theres a sense that 'it's like this everywhere.'

And it's scary to stand up for yourself! And for others! And where to start, like... what did you even do in your situation?

I tried to organize the flower shop. I wish I had been bolder about it. A colleague would say something like 'what if we went on strike?' And I'd be like 'yes we absolutely should.' But when it feels like a real possibility, they'd get real shy about bringing it up.

There are more ways to unionize than strike, I know. Methods that are less dramatic. But I can never remember them when I need to.

I just wish I'd known more about them a year ago.

So I guess what I'm trying to say in a rambling sort of way is that it's not just you, it's not just your workplace. You're not lazy, the work is harder than it used to be. And if we work together, maybe we can fix it.

Can you even unionize when there's only 2 employees in your dept? When there's supposed to be several more? I keep thinking I should try to get the pharmacy techs at my location to unionize, but there's literally only 2 of us.

You can unionize if there's two of you. You can unionize, to a point, if there's one of you.

JOIN THE IWW

Or you can look up what your local healthcare worker union chapter is. For the US and Canada, healthcare workers are part of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW)

A union doesn't have to be only your workplace. And if there's only two of you and there should be more? Please join. Or at least reach out to your local chapter and let them know what's going on. They'll have the resources to help you unionize or join them and possibly do things like file complaints or even legal action

He works so hard! 🐸💚

I finally got around to finishing this doodle? Line art? Madness? After having it taped to my wall for months unfinished.

And progression pics below.

They put the Minotaur in that

dark city planner show me the forbidden metro

One uncanny aspect of translating is when I am grappling with a sentence that would sound particularly wrong if I tried to preserve any part of the original structure or idioms, because nothing about it matches the way one would phrase such an idea in my language, so what I need to do is mentally divorce the sentence from its syntax and vocabulary, to try and find how my language would give form to the same concepts. It always makes me wonder, what am I working with here? What is left when you remove the grammar and specific word choices from a sentence? I don’t know, a shapeless mental porridge of pure meaning, a nebulous feeling of what another brain has tried to express. I find it amazing that your mind knows just what to do with something so unfathomable—that it’s just like “right, right, give me a minute” as it distillates meaning out of words like it’s nothing then lassoes it down from the platonic realm of forms to give it a completely new shape. What is ‘meaning’ and how does it exist in your mind in this liminal moment after you’ve extracted it from a foreign language but haven’t yet found words in your own language that can embody it? I don’t know.

— C.S. Lewis, in his review of The Lord of the Rings

consciousness is a gift but it is has tricked us into thinking that we can simply will ourselves into higher or otherwise more improved versions of our person through endless introspection. all other creatures in the animal kingdom recognize that change only comes from action…..when a lizard feels sick, they’ll lay in the sun because they know sunlight manufactures much needed nutrients. there is very limited action -> reaction in the darkness of your skull unless it’s in some way informed by the things happening around you, and “growth” being isolated in this way can only serve to endlessly recontextualize thoughts, memories and feelings to the point where they are rendered irrelevant to the reality they were based in. I wrote this paragraph largely just to deliver that lizard fact.

— Mary Roach. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void.  (via hummeline)

I want slower packages delivered by transportation workers who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding

@mortuarybees​: #i think its deeply important for all of us to come to terms with the fact that its actually fine to be mildly inconvenienced

Whale Shark Gliding Through Bioluminiscent Algae _ Mike Nulty

SPACE SHARK

You ever sit there doing something with your hands, listening to a podcast or audiobook or something, and suddenly realise that's your natural state to be. This is what you're supposed to be doing, crafting something nice while listening to another human's speech and thoughts. How people have done this for as long as there's been people, from crafting arrow heads from rocks while listening to grandma tell the tale of the mammoth hunt, to having a friend read aloud from a book while you're all fixing horse reins and doing needlework, to you sitting there doing whatever you're doing, with youtube open on the background.

im in love with her

You look around the lecture hall and notice all the other students have fallen asleep. You look towards the lecturer, who has now stopped talking and is staring straight at you. “I don’t know how you’re still awake, but I guess we do this the hard way.” He says before pulling out a sword.

@sindar-princeling​ you can’t leave this gold in the tags

for those interested, here’s what Jones had to say about her time as his student

“When I was a student at Oxford, both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were lecturing there, Lewis magnificently and Tolkien badly and inaudibly, and the climate of opinion was such that people explained Lewis’s children’s books by saying ‘It’s his Christianity, you know,’ as if the books were the symptom of some disease, while of Tolkien they said he was wasting his time on hobbits when he should have been writing learned articles…

“I imagine I caused Tolkien much grief by turning up to hear him lecture week after week, while he was trying to wrap his lectures up after a fortnight and get on with The Lord of the Rings (you could do that in those days, if you lacked an audience, and still get paid). I sat there obdurately despite all his mumbling and talking with his face pressed up to the blackboard, forcing him to go on expounding every week how you could start with a simple quest-narrative and, by gradually twitching elements as it went along, arrive at the complex and entirely different story of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale – a story that still contains the excitement of the quest-narrative that seeded it. What little I heard of all this was wholly fascinating.”

– Diana Wynne Jones

#thank u for the context lmao

This actually explains a bit of Dianna Wynne Jones’ writing style for me, the sense of something deeper just beneath the surface…

I do recommend her books, not just Howls Moving Castle but also, and mainly, The Chrestomanci Chronicles, which are eerie and wonderful like sea monsters moving dimly beneath a calm and beautiful sea.

wait wait wait

the same person wrote Howls Moving Castle AND Chronicles of Chrestomanci?!

Boop.

Love is the best scent #33.

Art from "Do Rabbits Have Christmas"

by Aileen Fisher, illustrated by Sarah Fox-Davie