Samo's Day Old Teeth

The Black Nerd. A common character type, the nerd will always be very interested in all things nerdy: science, video games, mathematics, etc. In an continued effort to combat stereotypes, the Black Nerd will be lack athleticism, probably being asthmatic (the nerdiest of conditions). The Black Nerd will dress smartly, suspenders and bow ties. They’ll always talk smart too, using proper English with complex words.

Now, I don’t have a problem with a black character being a nerd, indeed black people are a people; we aren’t all the same and we all have varying personalities. The problem I have is that too often we see a distinct disconnect between Blackness and the Black Nerd. The Black Nerd doesn’t listen to hip hop or rap, only classical music. The Black Nerd only has white friends, the only other black characters are into not nerdy stuff. The Black Nerd never ever uses AAVE at any time in any context.

Well @dumbey, seems we’re in similar boats

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.

I am diabetic, I am on Mounjaro, and it’s done better for my HbA1c (blood sugar average) than any medication in the previous ten years of treatment, and would likely push me back into effectively “remission” on a higher dose, which I cannot be prescribed because of market conditions; and if I weren’t already on it from the NHS trial period, I would likely not get it now.

if you'd rather buy a plushie - here's the shop he and his wife run!

his wife also been in an accident and has been down and out due to illness and injury

ppal + gfm + site shop

Insisting there was still plenty left to eat, local party hosts Dana and Mark Randolph reportedly encouraged late-arriving guest Jonathan Morse this weekend to load up on food that had been sitting out in the sun for the past four hours. “We’ve got a whole spread, so just grab a plate and dig in,” said the Randolphs, pointing their guest toward a table filled with a variety of dried-out cheese slices, wilted salad greens, mushy coleslaw, and discolored guacamole that had been exposed to direct sunlight for the entire afternoon.

Guitarist Grant Green (born June 6, 1935)