open says ami

if you've made replies on posts there is now a tab on your blog showing every post youve replied to and your reply.

if this is not what you want, either go to your blog and click comments and disable it from there or just go to your individual blogs setting pages. just change it from blue to grey if you dont want everyone to see your replies AND the post you're replying to

PLEASE BE ADVISED that it is set to disabled for blogs that have not made any replies but it will turn ON if you reply with that blog in the future.! i just tested it with my main, which was greyed out but it turned on the moment i left a test reply

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.

you encounter a secunit for the first time.

it saves your life in a situation where no one else would have been fast, strong, agile, and composed enough to do so.

your security team is immediately more alarmed by its presence than the attack that is obvious to you as the bigger issue at the moment

they insist it's dangerous and struggle to relax enough to take their weapons off of it

then a combatbot attacks your group

somehow this secunit, much smaller than the bot, unarmored, without any heavy weaponry on its person, manages to take it down. some real jaw-dropping action, all over in less than a minute

then it leaps into a room with two combatbots and not only survives, but it gets your unconscious friend out alive

then it immediately comes to your own rescue, disabling impressive combat armor

it then is dead-set on killing your attacker who is already immobilized and harmless

clearly this is an incredibly competent and dangerous and powerful person

then miki tells you that it IS rin and you finally put it together that not only is this person competent in the field, but it is also calling all its own shots and has truly come here all on its own and volunteered its services to help and protect you without needing to be asked or ordered

so this person is incredibly competent, dangerous, powerful, AND kind, AND fiercely protective, AND reassuring, AND intelligent, AND selfless

and it's still coming up with great ideas and still thinking proactively about how it's going to face down or distract another combatbot as though there's no doubt in the world that it, still bleeding heavily, still unarmored and barely armed, is ready for another round with a terrifying machine that appears to be nothing BUT armor and weapons

so you step forward to help treat its injuries

and it jerks back a step with the single most frightened face you've ever seen, as though you had lifted your arm to inflict pain and it was helpless to stop you

behind you, even miki can read the devastating expression that's breaking your heart and says "abene won't hurt you, secunit"

where did the fearsome fighter from moments ago disappear to?

yeah. okay. ouch. i deserved that. fair's fair hurting me like this after i've hurt a thousand others and counting. this part especially ow ow ow:

She continued, “The reason I ask, is that you’ve received a job offer from GoodNightLander Independent.” Okay, now that was a surprise. “They want to buy me. I thought I was illegal in the territories they operate in.” “It’s illegal to own a SecUnit,” Mensah corrected. “They want to hire someone who may or may not be called Rin, who they suspect is based somewhere in the Preservation Alliance, whose citizenship status will be considered immaterial.” She smiled. “I think that’s how they put it.” I still couldn’t believe this. “They want to hire a SecUnit.” “They want to hire the person who saved their assessment team from combat bots and contract killers, and they don’t care what that person is.”

(Exit Strategy, Ch 8)

I wonder what Mensah told Abene in her reply. I wonder how much Abene got to find out. Can you imagine that cold contact?

"Hey do you know someone called Rin? Super cool and badass and also flinches like a kicked dog? Yeah that person. Does Rin want a job? We will hire Rin properly this time."

anyway i wanted a memento of my first pride, you know, and this one vendor was selling keyrings, and i liked it, so i bought one. do you remember those italian charm bracelets that were all the rage like 10-15 years ago? it was a keychain like that, and it had a rainbow rooster, a rainbow cat, and then just a rainbow, and so I bought it.

i run into my mom a couple of vendors over and she goes oh you bought something? what’d you get? so i showed her, and i was like, “I’m not sure why it’s a rooster and a cat. Seems kind of random. But I liked the rainbows.”

and my mom, who was some form of minister’s wife for most of my childhood and teenagerhood, stares at me like she thinks i’m joking.

“What?” i say.

…relic…

Special mention to my fellow asexuals and aromatic people! Be unapologetically yourself!

to wit:

bottom's the raw capture, middle's just flat curve correction to make the footage visible, top is the final coloring with /counts seven adjustment layers to add back in Literally Anything But Yellow