Maybe A Sunflower. Or not.

"It would've been all right if he'd saved my life some really extraordinary number of times, ten or thirteen or so - thirteen is a number with distinction."

And no one questions that this is exactly what we need to do in order to have more safe drivers on the road. No one questions that a child could want to know about and even desire how to operate a car someday, even if they are too young to do so now. No one even questions that sometimes kids even drive cars before 18.

could have taken this in the

fourteenth century.

And yet.

I have not followed my own teachings. When inserting menstrual cups I’ll basically just shrug and shove it up into my body, reasoning that blood is good enough.

My beloved has always been utterly horrified by this practice but since I’ve been conditioned from a young age not to register most discomfort I just shrugged it off. It wasn’t actively painful. Good enough. The topic has been a point of contention that never fails to make them throw their hands up in exasperation at me.

But recently one of my Flex cups tore on the little pull loop. You can’t reconnect silicone with melting so the broken pull tab dangles like a little burr causing a lot of discomfort. I put up with it for two days, squirming from an increasing irritation that was impossible to ignore.

On the third day my beloved and I were in the bathroom together. I was in the shower while they got dressed in the mirror. After emptying my cup I huffed with annoyance at the thought of reinserting it. I used some lube. I reasoned that it might help make it bearable for this past day.

The experience was in every way more pleasant, not a routine to be suffered but just another part of my morning.

I said, “Babe. Hey. Oh my god. I’ve had a revelation. I’ve made a stunning breakthrough that no one has ever thought of before.”

“Uh huh?” they replied distractedly, getting ready for work.

“No. Come look at me. I need eye contact.”

The obediently turned and pulled aside the curtain to look at me.

“Did you know. That if you use lube. Putting in a menstrual cup is so easy? It’s like, why haven’t we been doing this all along? Who would ever do this without lube.”

“I told you so!” they crowed, equal parts smug and exasperated. “I’ve told you for years!”

“I think you’re mistaken, I just made this discovery, no one has ever thought of this before.”

There is a finite amount of memory on any given device.

No matter how good your game is, players will want memory for other things on their devices.

Games have had huge unified overworlds that stream area to area without loading screens for over 25 years!

And they can fit on an SD card! Why would you need gigabit fiber to play anything

AAA game design over-weights the niche hobbyist with a $5,000+ dual-9070 setup who needs to get 120+ FPS when, y’know, human vision is about 10fps and our brain just blurs the frames for the illusion of continuous motion.

Like, we don’t need 20-billion-triangle raytraced scenes with subpixel antialiasing and subsurface scattering to feel immersed in a game. I get immersed playing Arrows on my phone! I got immersed playing Raiders of the Lost Ark at 320x240 on my Atari 2600! And tiny Space Invaders on my GCE LCD game watch in 1984!

Serve Coffee

Turn the lights up higher

Turn off the music

Start cleaning up or washing dishes

Put away drinks and food. Offer people portions of the leftovers.

Return things to their normal, non guest accommodating state (take the leaf out of the table, put away extra seating)

Thank people for coming

Discuss (in the past tense) how lovely the visit/party/gathering was

Ask people about their arrangements to get home safely

Ask people about their plans for the rest of the day/evening

Inform them of your plans for the rest of the day/evening

Making fun of a group of people that are privileged over you is one thing, but wishing non-cartoonish violence and death on them ("they should fall off a cliff" vs. "they should be wiped out"), wishing sexual violence on them, dehumanising them, claiming that they're less capable of creating art or living meaningful lives, saying that their relationships are inherently shallow and fake - these things are fucked up. I understand venting and saying extreme things when in pain, but when you find yourself regularly posting about wanting certain people tortured and killed, you need to examine that.

From the book What This Cruel War Was Over by Chandra Manning:

During the Civil War, most Union soldiers didn’t care about the issue of slavery and were more focused on preventing the collapse of the United States. This would change as many Union soldiers encountered horrific circumstances of slavery and it’s widespread influence on southern society, with accounts like these: “Pvt. Chauncey Cooke experienced an epiphany when a fair-skinned slave woman whose children had been fathered and sold by her master told the young Wisconsin boy that her children looked like him, and that she missed them dreadfully because she loved them “just likes you mammy loves you.” ” “When an Iowan encountered a young child about to be sold by her own father, who was also her master, he vowed, “By G–d I’ll fight till hell freezes over and then I’ll cut the ice and fight on.”Sgt. Cyrus Boyd.

The president called in the US Marines and the state militia (in addition to the US Marshalls who arrested him and held him in jail) to allow this one man to be dragged back to slavery.

There’s more, which you can see on Burn’s Wikipedia and on the Committee of Vigilance’s page, the abolitionist group founded after the Fugitive Slave Act to protect and aid Boston’s large community of escaped slaves & black citizen.

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.