Rocketmouse: Stronger, faster, lazier

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.

Im a picky picky person who knows what they like and I use the filters liberally. But it's a pain to put it in every time I accidentally close my Ao3 tab or I wander into a new fandom. I'm well aware you can favourite a single tag, but I'm talking multiple tags included and excluded.

Thanks for your time and thoughts!

If you want to look up the same filtered tag again and again, the easiest way is to bookmark the results page. The URL has all of the filters in it, so reloading that URL will give you the latest results with all of the filters applied.

sidenote: it's possible to throw an error by applying too many filters just because it hits the max length of URL allowable by the browser

It allows you to search for something, add all your filters/exclusions you want on it and then save it, and then with one button have it tell you if there are any updates to that filter and how many. Really helps with rare things that get maybe one update a week and you're constantly refreshing them...

in new zealand, our evil government are trying to legislate definitions of women and men, in ways that are legally incoherent but clearly trying to pave the way for more horrifically transphobic legislation. we have an election in a few months but our main opposition party, and all our mainstream news media, are so spineless and cooked that there's a good chance the ghouls will win reelection.

it took 2 whole months for local terf group 'speak up for women' to get 2,000 signatures on the petition that led to this new bill in our parliament.

it's taken five days for this pro-trans 'they don't speak for us' petition to get 17,000 signatures.

this is a show of support that is really heartening for a lot of trans people in our corner of the world.

cis/ish women, if you're from here but haven't signed yet, please do. and if you're not from here and you know any new zealanders, could you send them this petition? a full fifth of our population lives overseas, and there's a good chance they don't follow the news.

“You’re killing me,” I said. “I can’t take any more of that!”

Now serious, she said it was clear to her that none of that stuff about Mary’s clothes mattered, at least if her clothes weren’t the point. What mattered most about the image was that Mary was holding her diploma and smiling. “But,” she wondered, “do I say, Mary has a huge smile on her face as she shows her diploma or Mary has an exuberant smile or showing her teeth in a smile and her eyes are crinkled at the edges?”

It’s simple. Mary has a huge smile on her face is the best one. It’s the don’t-second-guess-yourself option."

Smiling matters because it's an indicator of emotion. The quality of the teeth only matter if it's relevant to the joke. Striped shirt only matters if the text describes it as polka dots and that's the point.

"A photo of an orange cat stretched out in the sun on a window ledge", for example, gives me the subject matter immediately - it's a photo of a cat - and the detail descends from there. Anything else in the image is coincidence or unnecessary; the photo was taken of the cat, and anything else in the frame is unimportant. The reason why the image exists should be in the first two lines - and comedic timing still works in alt text form! "A photo of an orange cat stretched out in the sun on a window ledge. A second cat is falling off a cat tree in the background." still gives that moment of realization that a build up to a joke usually would.

(Defining if it's a real thing or an illustration or a movie scene or whatever is also pretty important for context - "an illustration of a dead dove" is pretty different from "a photograph of a dead dove".)

"A sunny room with a large window and a park outside with children playing in it. There is a wide, sunny windowsill with plants on it and a cat lying next to them, looking outside" describes the same hypothetical image, but the order of it changes the importance; while it would work to establish a scene in fiction (well, clumsily worded fiction, at least) it's missing the point as alt text - the cat's the reason the photo was taken, but everything else gets described first!

I am also totally blind, and frankly do not care what kind of shirt someone is wearing unless it is relevant to the surrounding post. Tell me what's relevant, keep it as brief as possible.

Friendly reminder that Popeye is bigender, because their gender is "amphibious".

And when the official Popeye Twitter account was asked what Popeye's pronouns were, Popeye answered:

I ain't use pronouns on account o' all me nouns are amateurs!

If you're a member of your local library, find their social media and say something nice about these programs and posts, please? Especially if you're in one of the less liberal leaning areas. It would mean a lot to us. And attend them too! Say something nice about a Pride display (or any themed display) if you're in the building!

I've bit the bullet and set up a gofundme to try and keep my phone on while I look for work. The lack of unemployment is really starting to hit.

It also has links to most of the other ways you can help out.

And us horrid young adults would ask her why she still worked at Taco Bell, because it was starter job and who would want to stay there forever? Her response?

“I make enough money to make sure I always have roses in my bedroom.”

This answer changed me as a person. It changed the way I thought about what makes someone successful, and made me step back and realize that I was so caught up in what I thought success and happiness should mean that I didn’t know what I wanted them to mean.