Its okay they could call me on a rotary faster than i could explain to them I’m old enough to know what a rotary phone is

I can actually speak to this.

Mind you, I’m of the opinion that people should be dragged into the twentieth century, kicking and screaming if necessary. But… here’s the thing.

Until relatively recently, most of this stuff wasn’t mandatory. Cash is becoming increasingly expensive to use, and it wasn’t that long ago that you could just hand your card to the clerk. And it doesn’t help that what started out as “swipe your card” is now a five step process where you have to decline a store discount card, a donation to a shady charity, and a new loan on your house.

And the thing is, these older people are scared. Because they’re vividly aware that the world they know how to operate in is going away. The added benefits– which really aren’t as many as you think– of doing it the new way weren’t worth the effort of learning a completely new way of doing things before– and now they’re faced with the reality that the old way just isn’t there.

I don’t think a lot of younger people truly understand how much the process of getting and spending money has changed. When I was in my early twenties, I went for two years without a bank account at all. My job would write me a check, I’d endorse it, and they’d give it to me in cash.

I was able to pay my rent and phone bill with money orders, and my internet service was tacked onto my phone bill. As far as buying things online… that…. that wasn’t a thing. If you wanted to buy something online, you were still going to be mailing someone a check or money order.

And while the new way of doing things is more convenient, it’s not actually better. Don’t get me wrong, data breaches and identity theft happened before 1997, but… they weren’t a goddamn industry. I did not ONCE during the twentieth century walk into a place of business only to learn that the credit card machine wasn’t working anymore. And it really does not help that movies and tv shows actually make the problem sound somehow worse than the cyberpunk dystopian hellscape we’re currently in.

And you laugh, but this is going to happen to you. 25 years ago, nobody NEEDED the internet at home. For anything. Oh, there were things that could be accessed with the internet, but as a general rule it wasn’t anything you couldn’t get elsewhere. Sixteen years ago (as of this writing), the first iPhone had not yet been released, and there really wasn’t such a thing as the “mobile internet.”

Think about that. The people born the day before the first modern smartphone hit the market have not yet graduated high school.

And the fun thing? The rate of change is increasing, and it’s affecting everything. And it’s not going to be much longer before you find yourself saying “I just want to buy a goddamned pizza. No, my credit card doesn’t have Wi-Fi R capability. Why the fuck would I even want that? No, I don’t have a bioimplant with the details. That’s just madness. That’s how the four corporations that control the world track you. Just give me the thing to scan my card AND WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S BUILT INTO THE CEILING? ”

I mean maybe it’s gonna be different but I would like to believe that 30 years from now I would get a Wi-Fi R capable credit card suitable for ceiling scanning with bioimplant security if that is what the standard was, even if my old chip card were still technically compatible.

Maybe I’m wrong, idk, but right now as a Young Millenial I love the fact that I can pay for stuff at the grocery store with just my phone and my fingerprint, and I’m sure it will get more convenient as society progresses.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I absolutely adore being able to pay with my phone. But “convenient” is a relative term– it’s convenient for you because you have a smartphone, and know how to use a smartphone.

But sooner or later a technology is going to come out that you’re not going to need. Maybe you appreciate it, maybe you think it’s pointless. It provides a new way to do X, but you already have a way to do X, and either don’t have the money or just plain don’t see the need to have the new shiny, since you can still do X perfectly fine, the way you’ve always done it.

And then ten or fifteen years later, you’ll discover that you no longer can do X, because the only way to do X is with a technology that has been absent for the first 40 years of your life, and optional for the last ten or fifteen, but suddenly you just can’t. Not without buying this new technology that you don’t know how to use and don’t want.

Here’s a real-world example that’s absolutely fucking the over-sixty crowd: Two Factor Authentication.

When it first rolled out, it was only in high-security operations, and consisted of an electronic keycode generator– the little keyfob. Then they added the ability to send codes over text. Then they developed smartphone apps.

Now, the thing is– each one of those options require its own technological infrastructure. And when 65% of the client base is using the app, and and 30% is using text, the 5% that’s using the little keyfob generators are now an unreasonable expense. You’re maintaining the infrastructure to work with the keyfobs and a business relationship with the manufacturers of those keyfobs, not mention the manpower required to add the keyfobs to individual accounts. So you drop the keyfobs. A few years later, only 5% of the people using text messages for 2FA, because smartphones have really caught on, and once again– you’re spending a huge chunk of your budget on the servers that generate the 2FA codes, the capacity to send the codes, and a per-code cost. (Admittedly, usually broken up across a batch of thousands, but still.) So you drop that capability.

Now, a lot of 60-70 year olds have never owned smartphones, and are being declared “unavoidable collateral damage” by companies that use 2FA, because the cost of supporting such customers is more than the profit they generate. To make it worse, the apps themselves are, by necessity, getting more advanced, and in some cases older phones won’t run them.

And that’s a change dictated by security, market, and cost factors. That’s not even getting into things like… well, have you noticed a lot of companies are trying to get you to order and pay with the app? It has nothing to do with YOUR convenience, and everything about how McDonald’s wants to spend less money on cashiers. There’s a lot of technology out there that’s “for your convenience” but really it’s “for our profit”, and “for your protection” but what they’re protecting you from is saving money or spending it somewhere else.

I mean, hell… you don’t even have to leave [tumblr] to see Millennials complaining about how physical copies are going away and you can’t OWN things anymore, whether it’s music, software, or movies. Or how we used to have a cable provider, then it was a cable provider and Netflix, now it’s fifteen streaming services and a cable provider.

I can’t tell you what it is– though as Gen X, I will probably start complaining about it before you do– but some major component of how you interact with the world is going just go away. And maybe it will just be the steady march of progress, or it may be the forward offensive of capitalism. Maybe you WILL be keeping up with the technology, but the company that makes the technology goes out of business and you have to learn something new. Maybe the company that makes the technology gets bought by another company for the sole purpose of shutting down the easier, better technology instead of the one that is more difficult and makes the new owner more money.

But I assure you, you will find yourself saying “It doesn’t need to be this complicated. I could do this LAST MONTH. I have been able to do this since before you were born, and there is absolutely no reason I should not be able to do this now.”

This problem will be complicated by the fact that the first time it happens, it will turn out to be totally possible, it’s just that this particular clerk doesn’t know how. The second time it happens, it will be hidden behind a menu option that maybe makes sense once it’s in front of you, but neither you or the clerk feels like they should have been expected to figure that out intuitively. There will probably be more than one case where the problem is, in fact, the little shit behind the counter doesn’t want to admit they they might be wrong, or just doesn’t want to spend forty-nine seconds to find out/do it the hard way because they could spend that time talking to the cashier in the next line. And then one day there will be a hardware upgrade, a policy change, or the last guy in the store who knew how to do it accidentally was talking about going to Communion and management just heard “union” and now he’s not allowed within 500 feet of the store or any of its employees.

(Although I did not know it at the time, when I left my first help desk job, I was the last person who knew how to use the cockamamie Rube-Goldberg system that was used for…. well, in modern terms, dial-up VPN. They didn’t know it at the time, either, and because the damage was done, there was absolutely nothing they could do to help the guy who HAD to use the legacy platform, and if it weren’t for the facts that he remembered my name, I was listed in the phone book, I remembered HIM as a caller who was always easy to work with, I had the time, I had the patience, I had the kindness, and most importantly, I am a goddamn robot who was able to sit down on the floor and pull up all the configuration screens for an app I had not even seen in three months in my head like a fucking terminator HUD, he would have blown a I-shit-you-not EIGHT FIGURE SALE. To this day I’m mad that extortion didn’t even cross my mind.)

But the day is going to come where you Just Can’t Do It Like That Anymore… and that day is going to come sooner for you than it will for me, and sooner for Gen Z than for you. Technological growth is exponential, and prone to sudden leaps forward that nobody can predict until mid-leap, and even then we’re not even sure where we’ll land.

Hi! This is a rickroll. Please visit youtube dot com, type "never gonna give you up" in the search bar, then click on the first video that comes up. Thank you for your consideration.

Pete Buttigieg is just a faggot.

It's very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you're trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you're why the cishets don't accept us or including [aces/bi people with the 'wrong kind' of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can't you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? -- to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.

On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids -- late teens, early 20s -- asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled -- or didn't handle -- the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the "women don't get AIDS, they just die from it" poster. And so on.

I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, "they didn't care until it started infecting more than just the fags." I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, "remember when they called it 'gay cancer?'"

That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.

Never.

These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can't have it and they'll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They'll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.

And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.

Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.

You couldn't create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.

But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.

That's the part you don't seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn't even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died.

Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I'm a dyke, which seems to depend on who's yelling what from which window and what day it is.

Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they're the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They're the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word "dyke" in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don't fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.

Most cishets, though... well, they don't actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you're right there in front of them. Maybe they'll be okay with you, personally, especially if you're the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.

They need people to know that they don't have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You're useful.

But they call you by your deadname when you're not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won't put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.

I didn't want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he'd advocated for that tattoo being "over their assholes."

(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.

Fucker.)

But yeah. I didn't want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven't given up.

I need you to know that, too. This isn't a white flag. I'm not surrendering. This isn't over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.

But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them -- and he's not -- then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can't trim ourselves down to something they'll accept.

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we're here, we're queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It's revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don't challenge them too much, or it's conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we've got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That's it. Either it's all of us or it's none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don't agree with it but we'll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.

The brunch gays can come, too, I guess.

So, like I said...

This is why all that purity culture bullshit about taking the queerness out of Pride to make it more friendly to the normies makes so many of us furious. It will NEVER WORK. Appeasement always fails. Solidarity is the only option.

I love the taste of white tears in the morning.

Anyway nothing but support for the Mi'kmaq of Siknikt and Kespek!

"Our tax dollars are being wasted to defend against this" hmm i can think of a possible solution

From the article: Chief George Ginnish of Natoaganeg said private landowners in New Brunswick need not worry.

"We are not looking at taking your homes, cottages, or properties. Our assertion of title is against the Crown and a small number of companies using industrial freehold lands in which the Crown still asserts an interest. We will be seeking compensation from the Crown for the loss of use of private lands," said Ginnish, according to the news release. Kat didn’t read the article but it’s funny to think that she had and she’s panicking over the prospect of *checks notes* land not being plundered for profit.

Woah the indigenous people actually own all the land that you stole from them? What a radical idea! Even though its literally just a consistent application of your own bourgeoise morality if you weren't a hypocrite about it.

The transgender and nonbinary people of ancient Sumeria

Did transgender people exist before tumblr?  Transphobes seems to think transgender identities did not exist before “gender ideology”. Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid documents the existence of ancient trans people in a thread over at twitter.

//“To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inana,” reads a 4,000-year-old temple hymn to Inana, the Sumerian goddess of love and war. Non-binary gender identities are not new. Brief thread in response to that one Karen.

Link to A hymn to Inana (Inana C): translation.

Ishtar, the later Mesopotamian goddess of love and war, had gender fluid characterstics. Ashurbanipal’s hymn to Ishtar of Nineveh compares her to the god Ashur. “Like Ashur she wears a beard and is clothed with brilliance…The crown on her head gleams like the stars”

Gender fluid identity appears throughout Mesopotamian history, like that of the assinnu, a word sometimes written as a combination of the cuneiform signs for “man” and “woman”. They served as cultic personnel to Ishtar and even as prophets, like one named Šēlebum in Mari.

In Mesopotamian literature and myth, a gender fluid figure known as an assinnu named Asushunamir, helps rescue the goddess Ishtar when she becomes trapped in the Underworld.

In a Sumerian creation myth, the goddess Ninmah fashions several people out of clay. “She fashioned one with neither penis nor vagina on its body. Enki looked at the one with neither penis nor vagina on its body…and decreed its fate to stand before the king”.

Various other terms appear in cuneiform texts from ancient Mesopotamia that refer to people with non-binary gender and sex. The kalû was a singer, typically a man who participated in activities reserved for women. The pilpilû is one whose sex is “changed” by the goddess Ishtar.

In conclusion, non-binary gender identity is not new and not difficult to understand. Shame on anyone with a platform who uses it to spread misinformation and hate.//

Full thread here.

By the way, one of the clearest proofs of transgender identities in ancient Sumer and Mesopotamia, were the priestesses of Inana (or Inanna, also known as Ishtar). They are known as the Gala (referred to as kalû above). T

hey presided over religious rites, healed the sick, predicted the future, made music, raised money for the poor, and “dissolved evil” during lunar eclipses.  They used feminine pronouns and dressed and lived as women. According to several sources they also castrated themselves. 

The goddess of Cybele, who is closely related to Ishtar/Inanna, also had transgender priestesses called Galli. That religion became very popular in the later Roman Empire.

Top photo: Ishtar

i need him so bad ep.10000

+ bonus content “i want to be their third”:

you gotta include this photo

ağlıycam

This is it. The internet has come full circle. You can all go home now. We’re done.

[ID text–

First image of a burger order (translated from Turkish):

Followed by image of burgers delivered, one large-sized for human consumption and one small-sized for the cat (both with french fries and bun).

Followed by image of a cat about to eat the small burger.

Followed by a meme image of a lab technician with the text:

End ID text.]

This is followed by Tumblr user @dovewithscales’ comment “This is it. The internet has come full circle. You can all go home now. We’re done” which is a reference to the Cheezburger Meme of 2007.

Explanation of Cheezburger Meme on Wikipedia linked here: I Can Has Cheezburger?

Great job, everyone.

I have another dog to put on this theoretical show. The original story can be found at this link. If the link breaks, it's a story on NotAlwaysRight called "Absolutely The Goodest Boy"

Share reasons why if the tags if you feel like it

Pro-writing tip: if your story doesn't need a number, don't put a fucking number in it.

Nothing, I mean nothing, activates reader pedantry like a number.

I have seen it a thousand times in writing workshops. People just can't resist nitpicking a number. For example, "This scifi story takes place 200 years in the future and they have faster than light travel because it's plot convenient," will immediately drag every armchair scientist out of the woodwork to say why there's no way that technology would exist in only 200 years.

Dates, ages, math, spans of time, I don't know what it is but the second a specific number shows up, your reader is thinking, and they're thinking critically but it's about whether that information is correct. They are now doing the math and have gone off drawing conclusions and getting distracted from your story or worse, putting it down entirely because umm, that sword could not have existed in that Medieval year, or this character couldn't be this old because it means they were an infant when this other story event happened that they're supposed to know about, or these two events now overlap in the timeline, or... etc etc etc.

Unless you are 1000% certain that a specific number is adding to your narrative, and you know rock-solid, backwards and forwards that the information attached to that number is correct and consistent throughout the entire story, do yourself a favor, and don't bring that evil down upon your head.

Editor here. Can confirm.

"Two centuries later" just triggers a mental note to check if timing is consistent throughout the book, because it may mean more time jumps are ahead. "200 years later", or heaven forbid, "201 years later" will have me draw up a time line. The more specific the number, the more critical people become.

Strange phenomenon. Well spotted, OP.

actually i think i might have an explanation for this from linguistics? i think folks get more nitpicky if you have specific numbers because of gricean maxims, specifically the maxims of quality and quantity

basically gricean maxims are a set of guidelines that we all carry in our heads that we expect other people to follow when having a conversation in good faith - i’m copying and pasting definitions from someone else because my attempts at summing up quality and quantity weren’t going so hot

so basically, when you put a rough number in a text, people think subconsciously ‘oh, the exact number isn’t important, because if it was they would tell me an exact number, so i don’t need to worry about this’, whereas if you put something precise in, people’s brains go ‘wait, they think i need to know this information so i’ll remember it, but now it’s later and they’ve said something that contradicts it, so at least one of those times they were lying and i must figure out which time it was’

This is also true of specific months and days of the week!

I had to draw up a rough calendar to keep track of things in my novel because I decided it was important that a certain event happen on a Tuesday, and also I needed to remember when weekends happened and if a given character should be at work on any given day. It was really REALLY difficult, and I cut whole paragraphs sometimes in order to avoid mentioning a specific day of the week wherever I could.

My editor also tracked this thoroughly and had to correct me once, despite all my efforts to keep things straight. She also helped me cut more to make things easier, because yes, this is something readers get tripped up on and try to keep track of!

Can confirm. The 1992 Sailor Moon anime took so much shit for saying Silver Millennium was 1000 years ago, instead of “in the far distant past.” Why? For the simple fact that it’s implied Elysian was somewhere in Europe AND IF ELYSIAN HAD EXISTED IN-UNIVERSE ARCHAEOLOGISTS WOULD HAVE FOUND IT ALREADY. It was a massively influential place. It would have been attested in texts from elsewhere. It was a sovereign nation, so it DEFINITELY would have been bitched about by the Romans. And we see evidence of advanced metalsmithing in Endymion’s plate armor—you’re telling us NOTHING survived? It might make sense if it’d been in, say, modern-day rural China, much of which is unexplored due to hostile terrain, but Europe? No.

And don’t even get me started on Yu-Gi-Oh fandom and the attempts to figure out where in the king lists Atem is supposed to fall, because Kazuki Takahashi attributed him to a point where he’d have to be Tutankhamen’s son.

ah.

"Average fan spends 10 hours a month reconciling numbers in canon" factoid actually just statistical error. Housemate Alex, who spends 525,600 minutes...

shlep is one of the best yiddish words and we don’t talk about it enough

there’s no other word that specifically means 1) i am going somewhere, 2) it is a long and not very pleasant journey and 3) i am complaining about it

genuine question, because I have apparently(???) been using this word incorrectly this whole time: does it/can it not also mean, "I will be going there, and also carrying A Bunch Of Stuff?" As in, "I'm spending the night at their house, but I won't have time to come home after work, so now I gotta schlep all my stuff there and leave it in the back room until the end of shift?"

I have never heard this term used without Items Being Involved. You mean to say that one can schlep without having an armload of stuff? Or a giant backpack or something?

You can also be hauling stuff as part of the schlep

I feel like a schlep is always a haul, it’s just that sometimes the only thing you’re hauling is yourself.

Huh. I always thought schlep meant "an unkempt person"

That's a schlub! Sounds similar to shelp.

Sometimes you feel like a schlub because you got schmutz all over your shirt, and you were already shvitzing to begin with, so now it just looks like you're walking around in an old schmatte, and you can't possibly go to schul like this, so you'll have to schlep yourself home before shabbos and hope the journey doesn't make you too schluffy.

#yiddish: king of languages#assuming your language needs mostly revolve around 1) food words 2) endearments 3) insults 4) complaining [x]

Most ironic photos

Here’s a photo my dad took at work

I love Environmental Storytelling