Either the wallpaper goes or I do

fuck twitter

fuck reddit

fuck tumblr

and fuck you

The kid was picked up by an ambulance 30 minutes later.

Now as an adult working in security I get SO MANY folks- upper-middle aged mostly- coming to me to 'rat out' people they think are faking it.

I was once sent into a bathroom because a client demanded that the "fucker won't get out, so go drag them out"- I was NEVER going to do that, so I did a wellness check instead. You know who it was? A person recently released from the hospital after a car accident. They had a hole in their skull and major hearing loss. They couldn't answer the owner because they couldn't HEAR the owner.

Another time about a homeless man who got around town by kicking the ground from his wheelchair. "You know he doesn't actually need that thing, his legs work fine, it's just for pity points"- Oh, so he's not paralyzed, his wheelchair is performative? Funny story Dale, I actually know that guy, he was backed over by a truck and has chronic pain from his shattered pelvis. But sure, let's make him stand up and walk everywhere so nobody feels too bad for him and tries to help him or something.

"She doesn't need that scooter, I've seen her get out of it."

"Look how fat he is, because he just rides around and refuses to get up."

"She doesn't really need that cane- she comes here without it all the time"

There’s a phenomenon I actually see extremely commonly when literature is used to teach history to middle school and high school students. Let’s call it “pajamafication.”

So a school district nixed Maus from their curriculum, to be replaced by something more “age-appropriate.” IIRC they didn’t cite a specific replacement title, but it will probably be something like John Boyne’s “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.”

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is tailor-made for classroom use. It’s taught at countless schools and it’s squeaky-clean of any of the parent-objectionable material you might find in Maus, Night, or any of the other first-person accounts of the Holocaust.

It’s also a terrible way to teach the Holocaust.

I’m not going to exhaustively enumerate the book’s flaws—others have done so—but I’ll summarize the points that are common to this phenomenon in various contexts.

First, obviously, the context shift. Maus, Night, et al are narrated by actual Jews who were in concentration camps. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is narrated by a German boy. The Jewish perspective is completely eliminated.

Second, the emphasis on historical innocence. Bruno isn’t antisemitic. He has no idea that anything bad is happening. He happily befriends a Jewish boy with absolutely no prejudice.

Thus we’re reassured that you too, gentle reader, are innocent. You too would have have a childlike lack of prejudice and you too would be such a sweet summer child that you would have no idea the place next door is a death camp.

In Maus, by contrast, the children are not innocent. They are perpetrators of injustice just like adults.

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where children run away yelling “Help! Mommy! A Jew!! - the next panel says “The mothers always told so: ‘Be careful! A Jew will catch you to a bag and eat you!’ …So the taught to their children.”]

Maus also smashes the claim that people just didn’t know what was going on in the camps.

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where a Nazi truck is arriving at Auschwitz guarded by men with sticks and a pointing, growling dog, the boxes say “And we came here to the concentration camp Auschwitz. And we knew that from here we will not come out anymore…” “We knew the stories that they will gas us and throw in the oves. This was 1944… we knew everything. And here we were.”]

Third, nonspecificity. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas turns a specific historical atrocity into a parable about all forms of bigotry and injustice. I’m sure Boyne thinks he’s being very profound. But the actual effect is to blunt and erase the atrocity.

There’s the too-cute-by-half way it avoids terminology: “Off-With,” “the Fury.” Harsh language becomes “He said a nasty word.”

Notice how “it’s a fable” ties in with the goal of eliminating anything parents might object to.

And that’s our fourth point. Bad things can happen, but only abstractly. Someone’s dad disappears. He’s just…gone. How? Who knows. People stand around looking hungry and unhappy and saying “It’s not very nice in here.”

The ending is sad, but it’s sad like a Lifetime movie. It’s sanitized, it’s quick, there are no details, it’s meant to poke that bit of your heart that loves crying.

Maus’s description of the gas chambers, meanwhile…

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where the process of gassing and then taking out the bodies are described in detail as inmates are working. That it took 3 to 30 minutes to gas people. That the largest pile of bodies was by the door. The worker telling the story mentions “We pulled the bodies apart with hooks. Big piles, with the strongest on top, older ones and babies crushed below… often the skulls were smashed…” “Their fingers were broken from trying to climb up the walls… and sometimes their arms were wera as long as their bodies, pulled from the sockets.” Until the narrator says, “Enough!” “I didn’t want to more to hear, but anyway he told me.”]

A historical atrocity can never be a metaphor for all bigotry because the specifics are what makes it an atrocity. The Nazis didn’t just do “bad things, generally,” they did THESE things. And leaving out the details is simply historical erasure.

Finally, fifth: Fiction.

However much poor little Bruno and Schmuel might rend your heartstrings, you can ultimately retreat into the knowledge that they aren’t real and they didn’t really die.

Now, I write historical fiction, and obviously I believe it has a place, in the classroom and out. But no Holocaust education can be complete without nonfiction that teaches about real people who genuinely did experience it.

One of the striking things about Maus is how big the cast is and how few of them survived.

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where one character describes to another many other people who didn’t make it. Eventually covered over in lower panels by pictures of the dead.]

Because it’s a true story, Maus can also explore neglected aspects like the intergenerational trauma, which simply vanish in a pat fictional story that is just finished when you get to the end.

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where the illustrator sits at the drawing desk above the pile of bodies. The artist says: “At least fifteen foreing editions are coming out. I’ve got 4 serious offers to turn my book into a TV special or movie. (I don’t wanna.) In May 1968 my mother killd herself. (She left no note.) Late’y I’ve been feeling depressed.” Someone calls from out of panel, “Alright Mr. Spiegelman… We’re ready to shoot!…”]

Thus, books like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas are not an age-appropriate equivalent way to teach the Holocaust, but a false construction of history.

This ends the first part of the thread. But there’s more…

The Maus incident is not an isolated case. It’s part of a broad trend of replacing the literature used to teach history with more kid-friendly, “appropriate” alternatives.

And outside of the Holocaust, it usually doesn’t meet with much controversy.

It might mean replacing Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave or Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave with modern historical fiction, for example.

Wars, the Civil Rights movement, Apartheid: any “icky” part of history can be a target.

sleep issues can make people sleep all day and be awake all night no matter what they do. they can make people sleep for over half the day every day. they can make people stay up for over 24 hours frequently - and it just goes up from there. being up for days at a time just unable to sleep.

they can make people have a completely unpredictable sleep schedule too. not everyone is capable of going to bed and waking up at generally the same time, or maintaining it.

all this could be more temporary, or it could just be indefinite. like. having to live your life not knowing if you will or will not be conscious at any given time. you can't plan for fucking anything. you can miss almost every plan or event or obligation.

and everyone just hates you for it pretty much, thinking you're irresponsible and lazy.

There are real labor problems here. Base pay is often insulting. Customer tips carry too much of the burden. Workers need better protections, more transparent algorithms, protection from arbitrary deactivation, and actual recourse when the app or a customer screws them over. Car-dependent delivery is also an environmental and infrastructural problem, though in a denser city I’d still be doing this work; I’d just be doing it by bike.

But when people talk about delivery work, I rarely see them talk to actual delivery workers. I see a lot of abstract arguments about convenience, consumer decadence, “hustle culture,” and internalized neoliberalism. Meanwhile, when I’m out working and waiting in restaurants for orders, the other Dashers I meet are usually people who only speak Spanish, people who read as neurodivergent, visibly physically disabled people, or some combination of the above.

I have not met this mythical Disco Elysium poor ultraliberal hustlegrinder-wannabe people seem to be arguing with. Maybe that archetype exists somewhere. If it exists among any kind of gig worker, it would probably be rideshare drivers. But most of what I see looks less like “rise and grind” and more like “this is one of the few forms of work available to people who need flexibility, low barriers to entry, limited managerial surveillance, or a way to work around language barriers, disability, burnout, chronic illnesses and injuries with symptoms that come and go unpredictably, caregiving, résumé gaps, or discrimination.”

That does not make the current system good. It means the current system is filling a real gap that a lot of supposedly better systems do not even acknowledge.

As a disabled person who is burnout-prone and demand-sensitive, contracting as a delivery driver has given me an unprecedented level of financial flexibility. I can work when I have capacity. I can stop when I’m deteriorating. I can build my day around my actual body instead of being trapped under a manager who thinks “reliable” means “able to perform the same way every day no matter what.” That matters. It does not cancel out the exploitation, but it is also not fake just because it is politically inconvenient.

And delivery itself is not some inherently decadent evil. Sometimes people live alone. Sometimes they are sick. Sometimes they are disabled, exhausted, overwhelmed, grieving, overloaded, or recovering from something else - perhaps the stress and fatigue induced by their own job. Sometimes they need medicine, groceries, or a meal that will actually unplug their sinuses instead of whatever generic community-care slop someone thinks they should be grateful for. Humans are allowed to need specificity. “Food” is not the same as “the food I can actually eat right now.”

A serious labor critique would ask how to make delivery work safer, better-paid, less tip-dependent, less car-dependent, less algorithmically punitive, and less precarious. It would ask what kinds of flexible, accessible work should exist for people who cannot thrive in conventional employment. It would ask how cities could support bike delivery, worker cooperatives, public infrastructure, and real protections without simply replacing one bad system with a moral sermon about how nobody should ever want takeout.

But a lot of the discourse does not do that. It treats convenience itself as suspicious. It treats wanting flexible work as false consciousness. It treats the needs of disabled people, immigrants, and other people who can't fit into traditional employment structures as details to be swept aside in favor of a cleaner political image.

This variant of the Goldentail / Bastard Moray is known as the Banana Eel due to its colouration and markings resembling a ripe banana.

banana eel: [bites scientist]

Well he found a moray and attempted to hand feed it, and it snapped up the egg and bit the shit out of his right hand in the process and the dive had to be halted so the blood wouldn’t attract sharks. But was this enough punishment for Dumbass Dave? No it was not, because he had a Plan

Dumbass Dave’s plan turned out to be a chainmail glove. Where he obtained it has been lost to time, but he put it on his right, injured hand and down they went, whereupon Dave found himself another moray and tried to feed it some hardboiled egg

With his left hand

And yes it did bite the shit out of him and they did have to cancel the dive, again