this guy really always had something to say about almost everything and nearly all of it is still completely relevant almost 200 years later. fascinating stuff.

chaotic muppets interview

These are the words of puppeteers who should not be up this early

people will say "why cant the eldritch gods just be nice to humans :((" and then kill a bug for existing near them

my dearly beloved mutual you cant just leave this in the tags

While exploring a vast and inscrutable city which seems to predate life on earth I am gently picked up by something incomprehensible with the higher-dimensional equivalent of a cup and piece of paper, then lovingly set outside in my natural habitat. Unfortunately the being exists outside of time and can't really tell human cities apart from one another so I appear without warning in ancient sumer.

Comic I made a few years ago for an anthology

oh my god this is wonderful

I have now drawn a Toad and a Peach for the first time

drew Mario & Luigi before of course but never toad somehow

i feel like we as a digital society have forgotten the important rules of the internet

Holy god. It’s the bomb of all Drama at work today.

Okay it might be less insane than previously thought.

Basically I got in and there was an email that there was a new policy on lunch breaks which is that we are required to clock out for 30 minutes for a meal break. Which wouldn’t be a problem except we’re often staffing stores alone. And the company was like “You’re not allowed to close the store, though, just clock out and don’t get paid for 30 minutes.”

This made a lot of people very unhappy and was widely regarded as a bad move.

So our manager was trying to go over the changes and I was like, “So I’m required to clock out for 30 minutes even if I’m alone in the store for the day.” Yes.

“I am going to leave the store. I am legally allowed to leave if you are not paying me.” You will get written up.

“That violates the labor laws and this company has had to pay for these violations previously. I will leave and look at birds.”

After a very long very aggressive meeting it turns out we might be able to waive the break and still get paid but calls are flying and we still have the right to clock out and close the store if we are working alone all day. The company loves to pretend that we do not.

Step-by-step walkthrough of how to push back on wage theft! Make them spell it out!

"I will leave and look at birds" is such a perfect encapsulation of "that time is mine actually and I shall do with it as I please" and I love it.

Update on this: enough people were accurately reporting that they did not have the opportunity to take breaks because of this policy and the company had to pay a bunch of fines and then caved and sent us signs so we can close the store for our lunches.

Victory is a tiny clock sign.

If the store is not doing enough business to keep itself staffed all day, that is not the fault of the workers.

If they don't want to have lunch breaks when nobody works, they can schedule two people for half-days. If they can find enough reliable workers who aren't looking for full-time work, that is.

Off-the-clock time is NOT WORKING TIME.

Employers are required to allow an unpaid lunch break after a certain number of hours.

Employees are NOT REQUIRED to work during their unpaid time. Any of it. there have been lawsuits over things like "clock out and then ring out the cash register" which employers have lost. (They can require a minimal amount of post-clock-out activities, like "lock the door on your way out." They can't require "clock out and then stack the chairs and put the boxes away in the big fridge.")

"Just be in the store" counts as working. There is no allowance for "but we don't have two employees." Employer could hire another person. This would probably cut into their profits. Oh well.

If they can't afford to pay employees to cover the amount of work they need done... then their business is not profitable and they have made bad choices somewhere.

Unbiased journalism is not pretending both sides are equally valid. Unbiased journalism is reporting the facts even if those facts include that one side is irredeemably awful. False neutrality is propaganda.

Repeated for emphasis: False neutrality is propaganda.

if 99 experts say one thing, and 1 expert says another, presenting both sides as equal is misinformation

they are performing an experiment

Valuable science is being done

Unmute, ffs

@akiiame-blog @jadeandroses @supergay-64 @itsavee4117 @loud-kid2 @i-put-the-bi-in-nonbinary @cryptratfromrunescape

https://www.sfgate.com/california-parks/article/judge-says-park-service-reinstate-fired-employees-20220040.php

Public outcry works. Protest works.

Keep raising hell!

people are really fucking clueless about generative ai huh? you should absolutely not be using it for any sort of fact checking no matter how convenient. it does not operate in a way that guarantees factual information. its goal is not to deliver you the truth but deliver something coherent based on a given data set which may or may not include factual information. both the idolization of ai and fearmongering of it seem lost on what it is actually capable of doing

Remember what generative "AI" does, kids: it GENERATES. That means it generates answers to questions based on whatever garbage has been fed into it. Not "goes and looks up the answer." Not "already studied and knows everything." It's just reaching into its sack of word salad and dumping a pile on your desk. Sure, maybe the words fit together to form sentences, but that doesn't make it correct.

a generative AI search result vs the exact article it is citing. the website it scrambled that information from also just happens to include info on winged roaches. gisborne cockroaches are completely wingless. even if it's pulling info straight from one reliable source, there is every chance it'll mash up that info into something false.

If you need a visual, here’s how poorly AI performed when asked to create citations for news articles. And that’s just for citations, imagine what it’s doing when you ask it more complex questions and tasks.

i miss when "don't normalize this" actually meant something. i miss when we would point out toxic thought patterns and note "you're romanticizing something tragic". i miss when you could actually call something antifeminist and you'd be taken seriously. what actually happened.

no, it isn't fucking normal we have teen girls saying "tee hee girl math girl dinner i'm just a girl." no it's not fucking romantic that your man lured you away from your hobbies and your career so you could raise his children and rely on his financial support. yes it's fucking antifeminist for you to say "i'll explain this mathematical concept so the girls can understand it". just because you put it in pink and make it wear a bow doesn't mean it's a safe little doll. it's still the same wolf.

you are being taught to casually accept gender essentialism and bigotry as the natural rule of order! you are being taught to self-admonish and self-control! you are not just being boiled! the water has practically evaporated! this is no longer a thought experiment, my love. this is a genuine problem.

There should be no billionaires.

Start killing billionaires.

On one hand I understand not teaching cursive in school anymore, because it actually is slower than regular handwriting and almost everything is typed on a keyboard now anyways.

On the other hand, so much of our (even recent!) history was written in cursive, and having a whole generation of kids who can't read letters written by their grandparents, momentos saved by their great-grandparents, or even photo albums from theur immediate family seems like a dangerously quick way to detach us from previous generations.

And on the third, related but slightly malformed hand, I feel bad that yet another form of small, everyday art that brings joy in the middle of mundane tasks, which celebrates personality and individual style and self-expression, is about to fade into obscurity because it wasn't efficient enough for today's world to put up with.

Like... if we continue to whittle away the small arts out of every day life, what's going to be left except stark, ruthless pragmatism?

Maybe writing a grocery list is less mundane when you get to feel elegant for a moment. Maybe you're a little more proud of what you write when you see it flow together like a painting

Sometimes I make posts that are like “Hey guys, maybe everything being optimized for efficiency and cheapness leaves some major defects in the average person’s ability to thrive psychologically” and some of you pop off like I’ve said I want to kill everyone who uses insulin with my bare hands, when mostly what I’m talking about is this sort of thing.

When life gives you bears… trick them into doing market research?

@mercuryjellyfish

What I really like about this is that the containers all have prominent labels with a camera pointing directly at them, but it’s still called a double-blind trial because the researcher isn’t present and the bear can’t read

what ppl defending kids on ipads don’t seem to understand is that there are other ways to keep kids occupied. my mom had a whole bag full of little toys and games for me to play with while waiting in lines at disney world. once your kid is like 7 or 8 they can read a book. they can color. or they can literally just sit there and imagine things. i did that a lot as a kid.

thanks for putting your wrong and bad commentary in the tags where i still have to read all of it. most of what you said is untrue.

OP: giving children too young to process things so much access to ipads isn’t good for them maybe.

People in the notes: So you hate moms??? You’re ableist?? You think we should go back to the Dark Ages?? (My personal favorite because it makes no sense) you’re poor shaming??

Why is it so difficult to explain that children not developing fine motor skills and losing their attention spans is bad actually??

Alla y'all ipad baby defenders woulda been putting opium in their bottles back in the day. We've always had fucked up ways of making babies stfu, and they've always been a bad idea.