Goin to Eeby Deeby

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.

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

MAZE Solve the World's Most Challenging Puzzle by Christopher Manson

A maze in the shape of a book, now in the format of a tumblr blog.

I invite you to enter my Maze. I say it is mine, because despite who else I might be, I am the architect as well as your guide. Your first goal is to find the shortest route through the Maze—a simple task, I assure you, if you know what to look for. I have planted clues throughout for your interpretation—or misinterpretation. Indeed, you will be fascinated by the Maze's ambiguity, stimulated by its mystery, stymied by its riddle. But fear not! I will be with you all the way. Fear not, that is, if you truly believe that my clues or I can be trusted.

Enter room 1. Which door should you take from here? Someone in the narrative uses the word “story,” and the same word appears above the door to room 20. Is that the connection? Is there a connection? Give it a try and go to room 20, which is peculiar in its own way. Just inside the door to room 27 you see what looks like the bottom half of an archer’s arrow—an arrow pointing the way perhaps? I will not tell. Perhaps it wouldn't help if I did. It is up to you to decide, as you move from room to room, hoping that fact is not illusion and that your best judgment has not led you astray.

Tempted? Test your wits against mine. I guarantee that my Maze will challenge you to think in ways you've never thought before. But beware…one wrong turn and you may never escape. DIRECTIONS

CONTEST RULES

PROLOGUE

this is also true of beading, fibercrafts, stamps, origami...

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)

Also they DID account for contamination in WET sample preparation, because they’d already learned previously that the nitrile gloves could contaminate wet samples, but this was the first discovery that they were contaminating DRY or AIRBORNE samples as well.

All of this was very clearly laid out in just the last provided link - i didn’t even have to read all of them to learn this, I read like 3 paragraphs of the nautil.us article and I was able to learn what happened and why it hadn’t been accounted for.

Like, I understand the frustration, but this is the sort of thing that has to be DISCOVERED before it can be accounted for, and this is what that kind of discovery looks like, and berating scientists for not already knowing something science hadn’t yet learned is kind of a pointless and bad faith approach to things.