pure poetry

So my problem with most ‘get to know your character’ questioneers is that they’re full of questions that just aren’t that important (what color eyes do they have) too hard to answer right away (what is their greatest fear) or are just impossible to answer (what is their favorite movie.)  Like no one has one single favorite movie. And even if they do the answer changes.

If I’m doing this exercise, I want 7-10 questions to get the character feeling real in my head. So I thought I’d share the ones that get me (and my students) good results: 

Cuttlefish pretending to be a hermit crab

@mmmskulljuice

look they were both being crabs thinking the other was a crab!!

“am crab.” “am also crab–wait a minute” “…YOOOOOOOOOOO” “YOOOOOOOOOOOO”

“Same crab!” “Same crab!”

Sigh.

Important update! His story went viral enough that other paint companies reached out to him and he got a job with a new paint company!!

https://www.tiktok.com/@tonesterpaints/video/6898720259675540742

Listen. This is what people are talking about when they say that if you gave people a fucking UBI, folks would still work. Even “menial” work is beloved by various people if it’s given the respect it deserves and folks dont need to worry about - um - starving to death and dying of illness?

I legitimately love delivering pizzas! If it were sustainable i wouldn’t mind at all doing it for the rest of my life! One of my best friends absolutely loves cleaning, and the only reason she quit cleaning professionally is that she was sick of the ways she was treated. My stepfather has been a carpenter and construction worker for 30 years, despite being a highly qualified graphic designer and architect, bc the man just fuckin loves construction work. For every “menial/undesireable” job available, there is someone who is happy to work it, if not for the stigma and need to survive. And for the truly awful ones? Like slaughterhouse cleanup, sewer maintenance, roadkill pickup, etc? With UBI they could almost all be mechanized, saving people from having to do grueling and dangerous jobs they really don’t have to do.

There are even people who will do those jobs because they recognize that they need to get done. Those people may not love the job itself but they take great pride in doing something that needs to be done.

People don’t just work for free doing jobs they love. If there’s a niche there will always be someone willing to fill it.

I talk shit but I actually don’t genuinely truly HATE retail, what I hate is how people (customers and employers) use, abuse, overwork, and generally treat the employees like shit

If I could have reasonable hours and accommodations for my limitations and be paid enough to survive without being asked to do 25 jobs advertised as 1 job and had UBI to ensure I could leave if it was too much/I was being mistreated/taken advantage of by employers looking to overwork employees to make more money I’d be totally happy to work retail as long as I physically could

When I worked retail, my favorite part was working in the stock room cuz it’s like playing real life Jenga

Were it not for my disability and if it paid enough and I wasn’t treated like crap I am not kidding I would be happy to work at a movie theater probably for the rest of my life, I loved it that much.

Trust me, for every menial job that “no one would want” there is a person who would LOVE to do it. Forget that “I don’t dream of labor” stuff in a perfect world people would still work because there are people who genuinely enjoy working; It’s being FORCED to do it in shitty conditions for crap pay lest we starve to death or end up unhoused that’s the problem, not work itself.

One of the best jobs I ever had was cemetery landscape maintenance.

It all comes down to this: People don’t mind working. It isn’t work that people dread or are sick of. It’s working conditions.

Pay people well, respect them (and don’t allow customers to disrespect them), accommodate their needs, and people will work their asses off and more often than not do it happily. Work itself is not demeaning or soul-draining. Jobs don’t have to be that way.

TIL the average worker in the US today would only have to work 11 hours per week to be as productive as his fellow worker in 1950.

via reddit.com

hey fuck capitalism

I had a job at an insurance brokerage once.  I was in a grunt administrative role that involved me handling all incoming business for the entire company.  I looked over everything that came in the doors for accuracy/completeness & then I had to enter them all in the database.  if something was incomplete it was my job to track down the missing information.  long story short, there was an expectation that I handle nine cases a day (about one per hour).  anyway, I got really good at my job and managed to meet the standard.  but, pretty understandably, I felt overwhelmed.  I was busy every moment I was at work and felt on the edge of burnout within a year.

I talked with someone who’d been in the industry since the 80s and they told me about how technological changes had revolutionized the industry.  waiting for a fax or the mailman throttled the amount of work you could get done in an hour.  there would be days where salaried people could simply go home because they needed to wait to hear back from someone.  if you lost a form or simply didn’t have it, you’d have to, you guessed it, call someone and wait for it to arrive.  the same was true if you were trying to track down information.  you’d better hope that whoever called was near their desk or checked their messages that day.  

now, don’t get me wrong.  I love email and having access to the internet.  however, one of its effects is that the standards for employees have gone up in exchange for nothing.  the reasoning goes that if you can get twice as much done in a day, you should.  in industries and occupations with high turnover, people will blame everything but the workload.  oh, it’s the hours.  it’s the pay.  certainly it can’t be the constant interruptions in your working day brought to you by email saps concentration all day long.  it can’t be that a workload once distributed onto two employees is now placed on the back of one.

the conclusion to all of this was that I was handling twice as much work in a day as my predecessors from the 80s and 90s for about the same pay.  due to the increased efficiency of email and the internet, bosses could effectively double the amount of work they foist on one person. employees have bigger workloads because of technological advances and lost pay through inflation and wage stagnation. 

“the standards for employees have gone up in exchange for nothing.”

吉田ユニ / YUNI YOSHIDA (@yuni_yoshida)

okay but you thinking it tastes good doesn’t excuse how fucked up the milk industry is or make it okay to support lmao y’all selfish 

Amelie Fontaine

ameliefontaine.fr

Japan’s vast assortment of mascots all share a similar problem.

Via @GorillaGorillax

There are a lot of times I feel like just…flipping the vegan script.

It’s not ‘polyester’ it’s plastic

It’s not ‘vegan leather’ it’s plastic

Its not ‘faux fur’ it’s plastic

Plastic is a pollutant and causes far more damage to the environment both now and in the future than leather or wool.

Please stop telling me that the Plastic Lyfe is the only life, it is not. My leather shoes will last a decade where pleather is lucky to last 12 months. Leather (and wool) decompose and are renewable. Plastic is neither of those.

THANK YOUUUUUUU~

A single wash cycle of plastic-based fiber (polyester, poly fleece, faux fur) may release 700,000 pieces of microplastic into our waters. Nasty stuff.

aw dangit

Wool is the most environmentally friendly fabric despite being an animal product.

Adut Akech at Valentino Spring 2019 RTW

Markus Matthias Krüger (German, b.1981) - Summer Drama, 2008

The brilliance of Gary Larson

wizard tea