We Need Trans Solidarity

Thank about it. Rocky's a spitfire and bounces off the walls at baseline and they looked at that little autistic, bossy ball of energy and went 'yes. that's them. the creature I want to spend the next 500+ years with'. They have to at LEAST match their energy somewhat. And if you think you wouldn't be a fucking ball of PTSD and bitterness at your culture and society after fifty plus years of not knowing they were alive or dead, you're fucking operating on moon logic. Honestly, Adrian and the other families were probably begging for a rescue mission that never happened for various political and logical reasons; and while it probably would have ended in mass fatalities as well, so thank goodness that figurative and literal ship never got off the ground, the fact that it didn't happen probably burns more than a little, reasonable or unreasonable.

So one day Adrian gets some Eridian diplomat on their doorstep, and they're expecting the formal condolences at long last, but instead they go into this whole spiel of ' so. So! Turns out twenty two of the original crew died, but your mate survived! When did they die? Oh, early on, so your mate was submerged in crippling and literal deafening loneliness for over four decades; and now he's back and acting weird, and he's become codependent with this weird fragile squishy human being that's the only reason he came back at all, and he's refusing to send down the cure unless we make the blob an aquarium. Could you come to the space elevator and tell him to stop being so unreasonable?' If that were MY mate? I'd fucking lose it.

Just throwing things at this poor messenger and shrieking like " Oh! Oh!! So it's somehow Rocky's fault that you're refusing to take a few months out of the several hundred Eridian years we have left to ship the cure we already have to Threeworld before things actually become problematic to make sure one of the two saviors of our entire species doesn't die?! To give the sole survivor of the mission--my mate, who's been alone and in silence, with no one to watch him sleep, for hundreds of years--some sort of solace and peace?! And you're wondering why he's acting erratically?! Maybe you wouldn't be in this position at all if you'd sent the rescue mission for which we've pleaded for years at every single thrum! I don't care if this Grace thing is a literal giant space amoeba; get the fuck out of my house and tell the powers that be to give it literally everything it wants and needs!" And they're all 'be reasonable' and Adrian's like " I've been reasonable for hundreds of Eridian years, and you would not be in this situation if you'd actually sent a rescue mission and not simply wrung your claws and hoped for the best, so fucking live in the nest you made. All I'm going to do if you get me on the radio with Rocky right now is tell him he's doing amazing and give him advice on how to properly parboil the Taumoeba so that you can't even recover even the slightest scrap of DNA if you don't give the flesh blob that saved his life and saved OUR lives PLURAL goddamn vitamins." Like, they think it's bad that Rocky basically stands over Grace's sleeping body and hisses? Wait until they get the MUCH LARGER ERIDIAN doing that for Grace and Rocky. Wait until the much large Eridian leads the families of the dead twenty-two crewmates to the space elevator to riot because this sure sounds like a coverup to them!! This sure sounds like the deflection of blame on the sole survivor!! This sure sounds like the same paralysis that left them to die alone in space because you didn't want to admit failure!! Yes, I know, I'm weaving some sort of political intrigue plot that probably doesn't exist in canon. All I'm saying is that you all are missing the delicious implications of a mission that went radio silent for fifty plus earth years with no word from the government and no obvious attempt at rescue, followed by your partner coming home with the only being that's been around to watch him sleep since the rest of the crew died forty-some years ago, and people are calling him weird and changed. You'd be horrified. You'd be sick.

Please call your representatives: VOTE NO on the FEDERAL BOOK BANNING BILLS HR 2616, HR 8705, and HR 7661!

Transcript below the cut.

If you don't know who your Senators or Representatives are, you can use Ballotpedia's Who Represents Me tool! (Note: there's a field for you to input your email address on their page, but it's not necessary to get your results. They just need a mailing address to confirm who your reps are.)

Once you've got names, you can look up and save your Reps' phone numbers in your phone. I find this makes it easier when I'm wavering about feeling brave enough to place a call. Just pressing a button instead of going and looking up the phone number all over again makes it just a liiiiittle easier, and sometimes that makes the difference between calling and not calling!

Forbidding the iranian team coaches from entering the country and forcing them to direct the game from MEXICO through a tv

Players from non european countries being stopped and searched like criminals with dogs

Deporting african referees just because of their nationality

Forbidding interviews from being spoken i'm languages other than English and forbidding journalists and players from speaking their native languages

like the typical reaction for an eridian without clothing on in public is oh that person isnt wearing clothes. time to go on with my day. thered be different reactions from different people and cultures but the consensus is that sometimes people dont wear clothes.

rocky stopped wearing clothes after his crew died cause there was no one to wear clothes for y’know. then grace comes along and maybe in those 46 years hes unwoven all the clothes for supplies or maybe he went on a spiritual and or cultural journey and became a nudist or maybe he just doesnt see the point anymore.

he explains this to grace eventually and grace is chill with it. he doesnt really care about modesty or privacy anymore because after more than 4 years of having your best friend observe you performing all your bodily functions, whether due to science or because of the fact your best friend can hear through walls, yeah youd probably be chill with said best friend being nude all the time too. i mean youre basically nude to him all the time. and he shat in front of you within like a month of meeting. so.

My orthodontist tells me I can make an appointment with the surgeon. I call the surgeon. They tell me I need a new referral. I call the orthodontist. They do a referral. I call the surgeon. Referral didn't come through. They tell me about their special unique system we have to use. I call the ortho again and walk them through the referral. I call the surgeon. They say the referral was missing some details so they have to do it again. I call the ortho.

The insurance company calls me about repair shops. I give them the name of the repair shop which I already gave them yesterday. They say they're not in their system but I can use them, but I have to call the repair shop to ask them to contact the insurance company. I call the repair shop and they say the insurance company is supposed to email them.

#Everyone has massively cut their support staff everwhere.#supposedly automation makes up for this gap except that it literally doesn't at all#You can fire 90% of your office staff and replace them with a phone tree#And all that happens is everyone hates it and it sucks and it makes your service completely unnavigable#But like. Who is going to stop you?

#Everyone has done this in every industry and field. There is no alternative you can turn to preferentially because they actually staff thei#phones. No one does!!#Let alone any means of communication outside of phone calling. Which remains the absolute bottom line of getting any info out of anywhere#You can cut your office hours because everything is on the website! Which you haven't updated in 5 years and the plugin broke and

#Basically the same principle we're seeing now in the rollout of AI has already been the status quo. The idea that you can just get rid of#all human support services. Replace them with some automated function.

#On the corporate side the logic is clear: once you have a monopoly (and who doesnt) the only way to increase profits is to cut costs#which means fire people. And if the quality of service tanks who cares because everyone's stuck with you anyway.

#on the government services side it's a bit more opaque.... I guess it probably mostly comes back to cost-cutting again.#Budget pressure. Reforms designed to strangle services.#Plus the longtime practice of throttling government support by making the logistical burden too onerous to handle#By way of wretched clauses about eligibility and the proving therof and etc

#And there's a very real and brutal class component also.#Everyone making these firing calls is totally insulated from the effects of their decisions because they have personal assistants.#Meanwhile the people dealing with the most of this shit are anyone trying to access social services of any sort#or even just do or get things cheaply.

via @screambirdscreaming

(reformatted into paragraphs for easier reading) these tags get to the root of the problem in a way I'd like to see more people acknowledging, honestly.

I saw a post the other day that was pointing out how people selling AI frame AI as some genius worksaving innovation or as a tool based on whether they want to cater to the ego of middle management types whose entire job is answering emails, because obviously the people whose jobs are most able to be replaced by AI are middle management email answering jobs.

fifa kills whales 💔

Wyland has said any financial recovery from the suit would support public art, ocean conservation, and environmental education through his foundation.