A Conspiracy of Cartographers

written for @ashfae who is a truly wonderful human being.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

Good Omentober drawing challenge Day 9

Stargazer

Another deviation because I can't help but draw my fav.

Good Omentober drawing challenge Day 9

Stargazer

Another deviation because I can't help but draw my fav.

Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.

Free courses on Coursera.

Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison

For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.

Then I thought, ‘Well, this is basically like a Newt and Anathema situation, isn’t it? They’re also a couple from ‘opposite sides’, a Witchfinder and a Witch, who get together but also they are explicitly Predestined thanks to Agnes Nutter’s prophecies….”

But the thing is:

Newt and Anathema’s ‘Hereditary Enemies Turned Lovers’ appeal was always pretty minimal. Newt is barely a Witchfinder, Anathema holds no ill will towards him or his ancestor, there is no real friction in their relationship around that part. The predestination part was by far the main focus.

GO1 and especially Book Omens's Newthema does give us a few nods to how Weird it is to know a relationship you are interested in has also been Determined by Unchangeable Fate.

While all the implications of Aziraphale and Crowley’s ‘Soulmates’ status in GO3 is pretty much always played as unironically straightforwardly Romantic. Even after they supposedly break away from God’s control…. “They will always be together in every lifetime and every universe” is supposed to the bittersweet but triumphant message their story ends on.

At least Newt and Anathema get to burn Agnes’ second book and actively choose to try and live together and freely. You could say Crowley and Aziraphale remaking the world and then reincarnating into Human versions who get married is the equivalent of that, but the fact that they have no conscious memory or awareness of their previous lives remove the aspect of Choice.

Also, GO1 and Book Omens are a bit more… ambivalent about the questions of the Predestination Paradoxes and how Free Will factors with Ineffability. “If God planned for everything and the Ineffable Plan cannot be changed, then this means They actually want Humans to disobey the plan and make their own destiny, so this is still part of the Plan” is the piece of Theological Bullshitting that makes up Aziraphale and Crowley’s main contribution to actually saving the world. It is a positive moment in the context of that storyline.

And in general, the tone of the ending of the Book/GO1 when it explores the idea that disobedience and Free Will are actually part of God’s Ineffable Plan is…. Maybe not in a 100% straightforwardly positive, but is definitely kinda sardonically jovial about the concept. Especially when you consider, like, the moment in the book where Agnes Nutter’s ghost chuckles with both foreknowledge and joy seeing her descendant reject her second book.

And the implication that God’s real plan might be to set the stage for a Humanist revolution against Heaven and Hell…

GO3, meanwhile, is of the opinion that this means that there is no REAL Free Will under these circumstances. This is just a hopeless rigged game that will always end with the destruction of the world one way or another, and this such a dire state and Real Free Will is so important that this is worth it for our two beloved Protagonists to kill themselves over it.

So, yeah, it does feel more discordant that the idea of these characters exploring how their Love might have been one of those things that always felt like disobedience and an expression of their own Free Will was also ‘Predictable’ to God and given by Them just…. never even comes up. Because Someone forbids these two actually get to talk about their relationship in any meaningful way in canon, am I right?

And even more discordant that the idea that their relationship is still controlled by some sort of Cosmic Force of Fate is their Happily Ever After???

The art of mindless embroidery.

“I don’t like…” no one asked go complain in dms