Pika

Disposable Rat

in 2015 I needed a job really bad for reasons not worth getting into. i was living in ohio for like 6 months & i just applied at every place within a 30 minute drive from me and i got a call from the local Game Stop mere minutes after submitting the online app, which was obviously a red flag but I wasn’t in the position to be picky.

so they tell me when to show up for orientation & I get there the day-of but the store is closed & locked. i text the manager & he says back “oh yeah. i manage two Game Stops and open them alternate days.”

apparently the Game Stop I originally applied to is open Mondays Wednesdays Fridays and the other one is open Sundays Tuesdays Thursdays Saturdays.

They’re 15 minutes apart. I don’t ask whether it would make sense to just have one store locally that is open daily, bc maybe the guy knows something I don’t.

So I get to the other Game Stop and walk in and it seems like there’s no one working there. There’s just a single woman in there wearing an ankle length leather trench coat. She didn’t greet me when I came in & she’s just browsing.

After ten minutes I ask her if she’s seen any employees and she’s like “oh I’m an employee.” She’s not wearing a name tag on the trench coat.

I tell her I’m here for training and she tells me the manager hasn’t come in yet. “he falls asleep playing xbox all the time but if he’s on live we can try pinging him to wake him up.”

I play Xbox and that absolutely doesn’t sound like a thing you can do in the way she’s describing it but once again maybe she knows something I don’t.

I ask if we have an Xbox that we can use to “ping” him and she says “yeah the one in the back we play on.”

She has an English accent by the way, a very specific & posh one which usually wouldn’t be relevant but we’ll get there.

So before she leads me to the Xbox-in-the-back she goes “oh damn. our internet has actually been down all morning, I forgot. We need to call the provider and have them come out and fix it. Can you do that?”

Can I call an unnamed internet provider and schedule them to come do service at a business where I don’t even technically work yet? Idk. She gives me their number and I call them and they put me on hold.

People are walking in and she’s not greeting them. She keeps browsing and people assume like I did that she’s another customer so they’re coming up to the counter where I’m on hold to ask me for help, and then I have to say I can’t help them and to ask the woman in the trenchcoat, and then she says “we can’t sell you anything. internet’s down.”

this goes on for 30 minutes and every time the store is empty she’s chatting at me and I’m on hold and then a man walks in the door and he says “sorry I fell asleep on live again haahaahaa” so this is the manager and the minute she starts speaking to him she no longer has an English accent which has me confused because it did not sound fake.

It was regionally specific and very natural.

the manager asks what I’m doing and I say I’m on hold with the internet provider and he gives me a thumbs up and walks to the back.

so I ask how long she’s lived in the U.S. and say I’m always interested in the way people can sometimes go in and out of accents and she says “oh I’m American. he asked me to stop doing the accent so I only do it when he’s not here.”

Suddenly I wonder what I’m doing here and I tell her I need to leave and I give no excuse but at this point I didn’t feel like I needed one? She said okay! See you later.

The manager didn’t contact me and that night I got offered some other retail job I jumped on.

Three months later the Game Stop manager texts me and asks if I can cover a shift in an hour and I say back “I don’t think I work there? I left an hour into my training. And we never spoke again.” And he texts back “hahahaha right on.”

And you may think wow, what a strange experience that all was but recently I have spoken to friends who did work at Game Stop and when I tell them this story they don’t even blink. Nothing I say surprises them. I was at the average Game Stop

the idea that restrooms, locker rooms, etc need to be single-sex spaces in order for women to be safe is patriarchy's way of signalling to men & boys that society doesn't expect them to behave themselves around women. it is directly antifeminist. it would be antifeminist even if trans people did not exist. a feminist society would demand that women should be safe in all spaces even when there are men there.

btw this is maybe the single most key distinguishing feature of the terfy strains of radical feminism, the seed all the rest of it springs out of: they have absolutely no faith in the ability of feminism to actually destroy patriarchy. they do not think feminism can truly build a better world. they cannot really even imagine that possibility. they think patriarchy is an inevitable natural consequence of unchangeable biological facts, and therefore the goal of feminism can only be to mitigate the worst effects of patriarchy, not to get rid of it.

they can imagine a society where women get some designated safe spaces without men around. they cannot imagine a society where the presence of men is not inherently a danger to women.

No one is discrediting the student protests. I myself am a student who is partaking in largely student-coordinated protests, drives, campaigns… but I also understand that we are largely missing the point if coverage of these protests overshadows what they are actually protesting for—the atrocities committed on Palestinians every single day. As the western buzz around this genocide gets more and more coverage, the coverage of the genocide itself sharply declines. It’s true and I see it every single day. Things are not being reported with the precision and diligence with which they should be.

Btw as all that is happen, Biden coincidentally happens to sign off 26 BILLION DOLLARS to Israel. The Washington Post broke it like 12 hours ago, but I had to wade through several articles to learn that the president of the US has given Israel his blessing to continue brutally massacring Palestinians. Like I said—the buzz around this genocide is overshadowing the genocide itself. And I don’t find it a coincidence that this was done while everyone was outraged by all that’s been happening with the student protests. Every time there is a distraction, you can be certain both Israel and the US are upping their murderous agenda somehow.

"nothing is real atoms never touch each other youve never touched anything in your life" ok. well when i pet my dog he is soft and when he licks my hand it is wet and that is far more real to me than whatevers going on at an atomic level

what my atoms are doing is their fucking business man i'm busy trying to stop my dog from eating tissues directly out of the box

nuclei don't touch, but the nucleus is not the core of reality. reality is made of electrons dancing. reality is made of bonds.

you pet your dog and the atoms that are you brush up against the atoms that are him, and the electrons that are you press into the electrons that are him, and both of them change their movement.

electrons of course are not really particles and do not really move.

you pet your dog and the electron-orbitals of your skin overlap with the electron-orbitals of his fur, and both are changed by the contact. you are not made of little motes floating alone in a void. you are a single unfathomable chord formed of a trillion vibrations, and so is he. and the note you play is changing at every moment by what you touch and how you breathe, and so is his. and atoms do not really have edges, and to touch is to interact, and when you put your hand on your dog the universe does not know that you are separate. the song expands to hold you both.

if you're wondering why THIS tiktok ban bill made it through the senate unlike last time...

biden's reasoning is the tiktok ban "protects national security". lmfao

holy fuck, they are so horribly angry at the constant mockery of their failings among the young and impressionable. they're FURIOUS that there is a means of propaganda dissemination that they don't have complete control over during such a critical time of people coming to the realization "wow this place and the people who run it and everything they stand for fucking sucks".

Had to unfollow this one person on here cause they just would not stop making posts about how transfems on e getting periods is just made up symptoms and like, I don't have definitive proof I only have my and others experience but like how do you, as someone who is not on e, who has access to the same amount of studies looking into this with decent sample sizes as I do (none), feel so confident to say it's all just placebo and made up ? What makes you so confident ? Cause I gotta say after almost two years of nearly right on the dot once a month suddenly feeling nausea all week, taking the most unbelievable shits, feeling all my organs cramp, and having mood swings out the ass which always just so happens to line up with when the two people with uteruses in my house also get their periods, I feel like I have more data to work off of than you do

LOSING IT

so like up until the 1600s, people believed that plants got their mass by eating dirt, because where the fuck else would they get it from. a guy named jan van helmont thought this sounded kind of funky and decided to test it by planting a willow tree sapling, letting it grow in a pot for 5 years, and measuring the soil before and after. lo and behold, at the end of the 5 year experiment the weight of the soil was basically the same. he decided that the mass of the growing willow tree would HAVE to be from water, because what the fuck else could the plant possibly eat, am i right lads???

anyway what im trying to get at is that its actually a really common misconception that plants eat dirt. they do not eat dirt. they get their mass from carbon dioxide in the air that they converted into sugars and starches in photosynthesis. yes, they get nutrients and stuff from the soil, but the bulk of what you see in terms of like, leaves and bark and Non-Water Plant Stuff™ was made from materials converted from carbon dioxide in photosynthesis. 

jan van helmont did not know this. jan van helmont self-identified as an alchemist and spent most of his time thinking very hard about how eating things worked while under the assumption that plants apparently got bigger from only water and absolutely nothing else. this, although some sort of mood i can’t pin down– a small worm, a similar hat, if you will– is not a life style i would encourage

This is a weird callout post for a guy who made the most logical deductions he could have given the resources and tools he had at his disposal.

i wrote this trying to find a funnee joke way to correct the ‘plants eat dirt’ misunderstanding but u know what? this is valid. post cancelled jan van helmont didnt deserve this

I mean to be fair the chain of “sounds sensible” is directly inverse to the chain of “actually true”

“plants eat dirt” ok sure, there is physical mass (dirt) and then there is physical mass (plant), most plants can’t survive when taken out of the dirt, this checks out.

“plants eat water” I mean he did weight the dirt so I guess that one’s debunked, and there’s nothing else plants will die without, and I mean they do have sap and so on inside them, we know the water goes into the plant. sure! weird but okay!

“plants eat air” get out of here. you’re just making things up now.

In his defense. They do also eat small amounts of water.

Y'all are going to flip your gourds when you hear about what plants do with photons

In fairness also they do eat part of the dirt too. They’ll sometimes eat a skeleton if they’re hungry.

everything nintendo related in it's entirety is in the process of being removed from the Garry's Mod workshop due to a DMCA takedown (most likely) from Nintendo. It's a very sad day, lets all take a moment to remember carlos

vanoss cant be luigi anymore. because of woke

Shaded Color Comic Commission

Grrr anatomy grrrr

Ghost girls

A fucked up bitch and her bird boyfriend

Inspired by that pose from the Red Flags music video.

The Long Quiet bullying session