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Therapist: Big Face Keyleth isn't real, she can't hurt you.

We are never going to fully recover. Whole towns are gone. My town was flattened. My street, a few miles south of town, was spared. We had no power or running water for four days. We lost hundreds of dollars of food from our fridge and freezers. We have no internet and no idea when it will be back. I work from home. My partner works two jobs - or worked, because one probably doesn’t exist anymore. My car took minor damage from the storm. Even if we had jobs, we probably couldn’t get to them. We got really lucky.

I so far have not lost anyone. Many of my friends are displaced. Some watched their homes be swept away. Some of them lost their pets. Some of them had to dig their children out of mud.

People - not organizations, not first responders, not the government - are clearing roads, doing welfare checks, forming groups of riders to take supplies up mountains on horses and mules. Private helicopters are landing in the middle of my town to drop supplies. They are doing this all over, all day, an essential lifeline for our cut off communities. The bigger cities are getting a more organized response, especially Asheville, which was essentially cut off from incoming vehicle traffic for a few days. Thank god the airport was spared.

I lost cell service, then internet, then power, from 7:45-8:20am Friday. I had no communication until Saturday. I was able to get a few texts out. I was able to get into town. Children’s toys were in the street. Some of my favorite businesses are gone. I saw a car part way up a house.

Please, send help. I don’t know what organizations to donate to. Any time I get online is spent networking relief efforts and getting the word out about missing persons. Keeping my family updated. Applying for FEMA assistance and mortgage relief. I have heard Blue Ridge Public Radio has a list on their website.

The death toll right now stands in the 50s. It is going to end up in the hundreds.

These communities are still largely cut off both by roads and telecomm and they need our help.

about 2/3s of prisoners in the united states work and most of those people make nothing for their work. if they make any money it's averaging 52 cents (that's $0.52) per hour and most of the money gets withheld for "room and board, taxes, and court cost" by the prison. some states, including alabama, arkansas, florida, georgia, mississippi, south carolina, and texas, pay nothing. here is a 150 page ACLU report on this that was published in 2022. if you refuse to work you might be sent to solitary or have your parole chances destroyed. there are no labor protections. people get killed. incarcerated people produce billions of dollars a year and almost never get paid.

there are basically three forms of prison labor. the first is labor inside of prisons to keep the prisons running. which means that if they let people out? their admin goes down. which is a reason to not let people out. the second is work release, providing inmate labor to private companies at offsite locations, like poultry plants, cattle and dairy farms, and other agricultural services. (this includes firefighting. incarcerated people are saving your fucking lives for less than five bucks a day.) the third is production of goods for external sale, including farm work, manufacturing, call center, distribution services, and others. and yes, before you ask, this includes immigration detention, which may i remind everyone is made up of civil detainees; immigration violations are not crimes but civil violations and people are trapped and exploited in private prisons and then utilized for profit.

this is legal because of the thirteenth amendment to to the US constitution, which states (and this is a direct quote), that "neither "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the united states[.]"

colorado banned prison labor five years ago but prisoners say it's still going on as of november 2023. there are other state initiatives trying to get prison labor banned, but when the government literally relies on incarcerated people to keep running, it's an uphill fuckin road.

companies which use prison labor or sell products made by prison labor include:

walmart

kroeger

target

aldi

whole foods

mcdonald's

wendy's

starbucks

sprint

verizon

victoria's secret

the dairy farmers of america

dickinson frozen foods

badlands quilting

pizza hut

hickman's egg ranch

fidelity investments

jc penny

american airlines

avis rental cars

the oregon department of motor vehicles

3M

allstate insurance

american apparel

american express

costco

enterprize

fedex

frito lay

hertz

HP

little caesars

kfc

office max

sara lee

xerox

“Acting is not about anything romantic, not even fantasy, although you do create fantasy.“

starting to suspect that tech bros actually just don’t know what reading is