The Adventures of Captain Kit.

@endigolikesarson In the original, for the running joke regarding Valant and doors, Apollo calls Valant a muggle

While in the remaster, he says this which is way funnier even without the baggage

There was a brief period in 2021 (the “great resignation”) where it was an employee’s market, but because a lot of people changed jobs, while a small fraction of industries were able to tempt skilled employees with good salaries and benefits in order to hire and appear healthily in growth mode, the question of raises fell to the wayside even more than usual. Especially because this happened during Covid—at the time a lot of employers just completely stopped offering cost of living adjustment raises as an “emergency response” to the economy. And then…they just never picked them back up. Every year became a “challenging year” and it was normalized for a shaken-up workforce that you wouldn’t get a modest increase in wages annually. While a lot of industries especially the ones most visibly in need of wage reform like food service have had static wages for decades, a lot of our workforce in places like public service, education, manufacturing/engineering, and mid-level white collar jobs, the types of careers that, at bare minimum, exist of offset the initial investment a huge part of our generation in America has made into the 4-year college system, were able to keep their heads above water more easily if they landed a job that would at least kind of take care of their needs in this regard. It was considered a dealbreaker for many people looking to switch careers if that wasn’t offered.

I think when we talk about raises and upward mobility we associate it with middle class people making the jump from lower mid to upper mid; this is really the only major type of class mobility that exists in America. You might grow up with parents who have no savings, and eventually become the type of person who can save and take their kids to Disneyland. It’s kind of hard to see this being denied to people as a crisis given that poverty is inescapable. However I think the type of slow decline in wage stability relative to inflation is extremely scary because it actually means many people are backsliding out of even being lower middle class without realizing it. In the grand scheme of things this is a less urgent wage crisis than what effects hourly wage workers, but because of that I think a lot of people don’t realize it’s effecting them, and feel guilty or frustrated when they have what looks like a stable career and feel something slip away from them.

For example: my second salaried job out of college was at the corporate packaging & purchasing department of a major dairy supplier in Buffalo. I made $45k plus benefits in 2018, a major raise from the $15/hr I’d been making before. People in that office had had careers at the company that lasted 15, 20 years, and relied partially on a steady, expected annual reassessment and cost of living raise. Without it, their stability their salary offered them would drift away slightly every year. This is bad for many reasons, but particularly because when you grow a career somewhere, it’s likely your life grows with you in terms of costs: you start a family, maybe need to take care of your elderly parents eventually.

What I hear anecdotally though this has changed radically in almost all career fields. There is no guarantee wage increases will ever be normalized again to the degree they were pre-Covid, and inflation has increased roughly 23% since 2021. The $45k I made in 2018 is worth $33k now. That is simply true. Let’s assume that company was generous enough to raise that salary commensurate with inflation to $50k by 2021. If they had done that yearly to meet the economic realities by 2026, that person should be making $61,000. But they’re not. They’re making the material equivalent of half of that, basically. That is a massive, mind-boggling gap, and has nothing to do with the role itself, just the value of money, and a lot of people who entered the workforce in the 2020s have no idea just how much they are being denied because (like I was in 2018!) they’re in their early 20s and happy to have a salaried job. But while that salary bought me my first car and enabled me to do things like host people who weren’t able to have stable housing at my apartment, it is simply not offering that to people today.

every time inflation is greater than a cost-of-living raise, you get a pay cut.

if inflation averages out to, say, 5% in a single year, but you only get a 3% cost-of-living raise, or worse, nothing? that's a pay cut, because the same amount of money doesn't cover as much stuff.

"cost-of-living" is a long way of saying inflation. when your raises either don't keep up with this or disappear altogether, your company is quietly cutting your pay without telling you.

it's deceptive, because the numbers on your paycheck will rise, but your purchasing power will not. so it will look, on paper, like you're making more, but when your dollars won't stretch as far, you're actually making less.

many employers rely on employees not understanding or even knowing this. and because the majority of inflation goes to shareholder returns, and not actual rising costs, this is a massive upward redistribution of wealth. in non-fancy terms, this means that rich people are taking more and more money from anyone who isn't rich. it's open theft by people who don't even need it in the first place.

This is a movie about a kid who leaves her birth family.

Not a kid who find that they have a secret lineage or something that allows them to find their ‘true family’ - this is a movie about a kid whose true birth family is made up of bad people. So she gets out. And that is played as the right thing to do. She isn’t punished for it or made to feel bad about ‘abandoning her family’. There isn’t an underlying ‘but they’re your family and you have to love them’ or ‘they’re your family and they love you even if they don’t show it well or do hurtful things’ message of the kind that I see OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER in media. Matilda gets out and lives happily ever after because of it.

The reason for this was very simple and very practical. In the very early AVEN and immediately pre-AVEN days, back before my time when the disparate ace communities were first finding each other and creating a public online network, there was a fair lot of exclusionist discourse. There are a lot of ways to be asexual, and the early community of course fell prey to the usual infighting about whether someone with a libido counts as asexual, whether someone who chooses to have sex can be asexual (usual tiring Purity Brigade Bullshit), whether someone without a libido counts as asexual (after all, if you have no sex drive, are you sure it's a matter of sexual orientation?), whether ace people count as lgbtq, all the usual nonsense. This worked out the way it pretty much always does -- the inclusionists "win", because exclusionists always break off into smaller and smaller communities so the largest group is, of course, the one where all different kinds of people stick together and welcome each other. And that was AVEN.

And when you're trying to have a strong community and somebody shows up at the gates saying, "hi, I think I'm asexual", it's a fucking horrible idea to start doubting their credentials. They saw the public definition and started calling themselves asexual; they're here, and now they're under the internal definition. An asexual is somebody who calls themself asexual. Sometimes, these people would be frustrated allosexuals, or people choosing to swear off sex, who might not fit the external definition of the term. We made sure that everyone knew the external definition, and there were always conversations about asexuality and how it affected our lives, if they asked us directly what we thought then we'd say "only you can know for sure" and then give our thoughts on the matter for as long as they asked for them, and other than that it wasn't anyone else's fucking business or anyone's place to judge. If people weren't nasty and didn't create problems, they could stay and call themselves whatever they wanted.

Many of these people who didn't fit the strict definition eventually left after receiving support and discovering more about themselves. Some stopped IDing as ace but became allies to the community. Some people who came in with the most "I'm a heterosexual girl who is angry at my boyfriend" intro posts you've ever seen in your life discovered that they were in fact ace and that the messages that society had taught them about sex and romance were simply not for them -- these are people who, in a gatekept community, would have been incorrectly ousted immediately.

And then there were people -- a LOT of people -- who found themselves in grey areas. People who said "okay, this community makes sense to me and is useful to me and I have so much in common with a lot of you, but not EXACTLY like you. However, what I experience may not be the strict default definition but it's an awful lot like these other members on the forum." And they formed sub-communities. The grey aces. The demisexuals. The aromantics and greyromantics. Through these dialogues, between subgroups who in a more exclusionary community would be arguing about who the "real" asexuals are and splintering off into their own communities away from all those stupid cishet fakers, we developed language to describe our similarities and differences. The sexual/romantic/aesthetic attraction model came out of these dialogues and it became so massively important to our understanding of asexuality that basically everyone in the ace/aro community describes themselves by it, as do a large number of people outside the community. The community made massive leaps ahead in just a decade or two by, well, being a community. By being a place where anybody who called the place home, and didn't bully other people in the home, was right. By being somewhere where anybody who saw "asexual: someone who doesn't experience sexual attraction" and thought "that sounds like a term with some use for me" was allowed to use it.

An asexual is somebody who does not experience sexual attraction.

An asexual is somebody who calls themselves asexual.

These definitions are not in conflict -- they are both, in concert, fundamentally necessary for a safe and vibrant community where we can protect, support, and learn about each other and ourselves.

TIDYING means clearing space, making your environment orderly and inviting. it usually entails removing clutter from surfaces, clearing the floor so you can move around easily, and creating psychological ease by putting everything visibly in its place. It's very visual, and can also involve things like straightening picture frames, squaring pillows, folding blankets on the couch, etc. It reduces chaos and noise and makes a space comfortable.

ORGANISING means sifting through belongings, ensuring that what doesn't need to be kept is thrown out and what does need to be kept is kept well. This often means categorising by room and function – teaspoons go in the teaspoon drawer, and the teaspoon drawer stays in the kitchen. It can also mean indexing things so you can find them easily (markers sorted by colour, paperwork divided into topical folders, books alphabetised) and preserving things (moving photos out of direct sunlight, keeping open flour in a sealed container, sleeving trading cards).

CLEANING means removing built up dirt, dust and grime, reducing the level of environmental contaminants and making your space sanitary. Bacteria are a fact of life, they love to hang out in dust and cling to pet hair and multiply on any given surface. Cleaning is how you keep that stuff in check, preventing it from building up to the point it affects your health. This means wiping frequently touched surfaces with disinfectant, sanitising utensils (doing the dishes), washing bedding and clothes (and yourself), and sweeping/vacuuming and taking out the trash to physically remove dirt from your home.

Tidying is not the same thing as organising – shove the mail, bills, dirty teaspoons and your gardening gloves in a drawer, and you've tidied the table. Sort the paperwork into piles by deadline, put the teaspoons in a cup, and roll the gloves together so they don't get separated, and the table is untidy but organised.

Similarly, a tidy or organised space can still be filthy. Just because all the yellowed newspapers and trash bags are sorted by date in the basement, out of sight, doesn't mean they're clean. A chaotic, cluttered space can still be very sanitary if it's being kept clear of refuse, and wiped and dusted often.

While this isn't news to anyone who works in this space, it is useful to have this water-is-wet research to affirm that Indigenous knowledge and land management are extremely effective at storing carbon and protecting biodiversity.

I want to draw special attention to this part of the article:

I get a fair number of asks and comments on my posts expressing sentiments like "human beings are a plague on this Earth", "humans ruin everything, we deserve to be wiped out", "humanity is inherently selfish, evil, and irredeemable".

I don't think the folks saying these things have bad intentions, I know their words come from a place of very understandable pain, fear, and anger. But to act as though humanity's impact on nature is inherently damaging and extractive is to erase thousands of years of Indigenous stewardship of nature. These ecosystems are thriving because there are humans living there.

Now, given the civil rights legislation’s hobbled state, minority voters will have to get “creative” and “ruthless” to ensure their full participation in democracy, Harris told Morial.

At the very least, that will mean voters will need to regularly stay on top of their voter registration statuses, to make sure they haven’t been purged. (......)

To hold the Trump administration accountable, voters should have “an agenda that is about turning out the vote in the greatest numbers we have ever seen, so that in light of and in this environment where they are cheating, we will be too big to rig,” said Harris.

If voters are able to push Democrats into controlling majorities of the U.S. House and Senate in this year’s midterms, lawmakers should be “uncompromising,” said Harris. This means revisiting policies around Electoral College votes, expanding the U.S. Supreme Court bench, and exploring statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C., she said.

It's a toll free service with people who will help you find programs in your community to pay those bills, find food, and find housing! They will give you numbers to call so you can get help.

It is not 100% foolproof. Their job is to direct you to a program they believe will help your current issue, but it's still a step up from praying random strangers online will give you enough cash before a deadline! The added benefit of these community programs, which get funded by the local government most of the time, is if there are more people using them then they can get more money to help more people.

You're not taking resources from other people if you use your community services. Your taxes pay for them. Use them.

Dial 211 first to see if they can help, and if for some reason they can't, then make your donation posts!

I can't speak for all 211's but most should also have a website detailing all the agencies in their database. if you don't like phone calls, this can be something to reference instead.

If you don't have health insurance but you need to see a doctor, reference 211! We list clinics that provide free or discounted general care, vision, and dental services to low income households and people without insurance! Many hospitals also have financial aid policies that can severely reduce your bill if you had an expensive procedure!

If you're stuck in a dead end job or need educational resources reference 211! There are a lot of programs focused on providing basic adult education as well as trade skills or other high demand fields! State governments are generally more interested in funneling people into work than providing benefits, but you can still use this to your advantage especially if you have some form of disability but are still able to work. That includes if you're neurodiverse or have mental health issues! Most of these programs are extremely underutilized.

If you believe you qualify for public benefits but the bureaucracy of the process is in your way, reference 211! There are agencies specifically geared towards helping people obtain the benefits they qualify for- for free!

If you need help with your taxes-

If you need help finding a pro bono lawyer-

If you need help finding affordable housing/section 8 housing-

If you need help finding food pantries-

If you need help paying for your prescriptions-

If you need help obtaining disability aids or assistive technology-

If you need help finding transportation options-

If you need help following a natural or personal disaster (like a home fire)-

If you need help repairing a home you or your family owns or it needs modifications to be accessible-

If you need Queer resources-

Reference your 211!!!!!

I had no idea what 211 was before working for it but I wish I had. I've learned so much about what resources are actually available to the community even in a ho hum area of the country like my state. I've saved my partner literally thousands of dollars just from the medical resources I've gathered.

Not enough young people know about or utilize these services but they are there for you!

P. S.

Rare Green Silk Poke Bonnet/Calash, c. 1806