eshir

(Tags via @romanceyourdemons)

Extremely correct response, leaving out the inevitable debacle over citizens declaring counterfeit genders in order to have rarer pronoun pins to sell to collectors in the underground pronoun market.

Dibbler, only mildly discouraged, eventually realizes he can sell embellishments for your pronoun pin, which he claims will upgrade your gender.

Also of note is that there are no cops present at Ankh-Morpork Pride. This is not because they aren't welcome (everyone knows Nobby is as kinky as they come), but because the festivities include throwing bricks at the City Watch building and they are busy trying to make sure they still have a place to work the next day. The Night Watch prepares each year with a barricade, and pre-marriage Vimes always collects the good bricks so he can save for a house. Nobody is really sure where the tradition came from, but it's good fun and usually nobody gets hurt too badly.

Moist von lipwig would have pride-themed stamps made; these would inevitably have some kind of issue, which would create some outrage and ultimately make the stamps more valuable as collectors' items.

I don't get the impression that Ankh Morpork ever had anti-sodomy or crossdressing laws, so I don't think the queer community's history with the police would be the same as it is in the real world. Especially because Cheery Littlebottom literally started the Dwarf trans/feminism movement as an officer of the Watch, with the Watch's support.

Dibbler would totally sell pride flags with the wrong colors (and then insist it was the "new, updated version" if anyone questioned him)

The nobility are all scandalized, meanwhile the Seamstresses Guild has a float in the parade

Adora Belle Dearheart is deeply involved with at least one queer organization and is one of the main organizers of the Pride festival, but refuses to answer any questions about why

Ridcully decides the wizards should be involved, and Ponder Stibbons should make a float and organize the refreshments for them to eat while riding on the float. Ridcully's concept of allyship is loudly saying, "Well done, that man!" and pointing at anyone he thinks is exhibiting particularly queer behavior.

Madam Sharn and Pepe release a whole new line of Pride-themed chainmail

Bengo Macarona is embraced as a gay icon

This did not go to plan.

He showed up for the colonoscopy and they were like "Okay, so this is going to involve twilight sedation!" and he was like "Oh. Okay, so how are we going to do that?" And they were like "with fentanyl and versed!" And he was like "okay so it should say on my chart that I'm allergic to versed."

Whoops. What this means is that they weren't prepared to sedate him. So he was going to have to be awake but on painkillers for the procedure, or he was going to have to reschedule (and his day of drinking horrible gut emptying fluids to prepare would have been a waste).

Normally when he's supposed to do an unpleasant procedure he's kind of awake for, they give him charismatic megafauna doses of injected fentanyl. This was not the team that normally does his biopsies, so they were prepared to give him enough synthetic opioids to knock out an average adult human man. (Large bastard is closer to the weight of an average adult male caribou than an average adult human man)

He decided that it would be less unpleasant to be awake and more-or-less aware for the colonoscopy than it would be to drink the juice that makes your intestines mad again.

Apparently it is not at all common for patients at this medical center who are undergoing a colonoscopy to be able to talk to the doctors during the process, so this was very awkward for everyone. He tried to lighten the atmosphere by asking the anesthesiologist if she'd heard any good jokes, and she flipped it back on him, asking if he'd heard any good jokes recently.

from one, two

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

There was a big push to eliminate "degrading jobs" but the strategy was to eliminate the position, then create a new position outside of the bargaining unit to do the work. So like, we wouldn't have dishwashers, but we'd have people who washed dishes that weren't eligible to be in the union.

I was like A) what the actual fuck? Dish washing isn't "degrading", it's fucking vital. B) What the actual fuck? You want to create a union just to exploit different people?

The first time someone told me that busing tables was "degrading", I was like "Oh, uhh, yeah, like it's very necessary work but under compensated for how vital it is?" and they responded "No, touching plates that other people have eaten off of is disgusting."

In bargaining, someone on the Union side suggested that we eliminate all the cashiers and exclusively use self-checkouts (they were a cashier and didn't like it). The organizer told them that the union wasn't in the habit of eliminating bargaining unit positions. (This is the same person I've talked about how said that "as a prison abolitionist" we just needed to execute most criminals.)

It got me thinking, along with Ann Russell talking about how to treat cleaners (being a cleaner herself), about how we conceptualise domestic service as particularly degrading in all its forms, when, really, why is that? Why is paying someone to do something intrinsically bad?

Like, even in a moneyless, gift economy society, there would still be people whose primary contribution to their communities would be cleaning. Some people like to clean, and are really rather good at it.

I've talked ad nauseam in the past about how British attitudes towards cleaners and other service based positions today are the descendants of Victorian attitudes. That is, both the attitudes of conservatives and many progressives of that time. The trade union movement was particularly exclusionary towards service workers.