Whumpster Fire

hold on let me look something up

i installed the classic ms paint and i've been playing around with the black and white image property that you can set in there (and that they for some reason removed in the windows 11 version raghh)

You can't change anything with your actions so don't bother. You going vegetarian won't shut down a factory farm so don't bother. You buying something in sustainable packaging won't make a dent in the landfill so don't bother. You donating five bucks to a charity won't solve poverty so don't bother. You buying ethically-made clothing won't stop sweatshops from operating so don't bother.

I agree that the only way these problems are going to get solved is if the government enacts regulations to do so, but the key point here is that the government is not going to spontaneously do that. Everybody says they want to protect the environment and for people to make a living wage in the abstract but as soon as regulations start being passed people start throwing fits about how it's impacting their lives.

If the government banned factory farms, meat would suddenly be priced like a luxury item and people would throw fits about how poor people can't afford protein anymore, if they banned plastic packaging people would throw fits about how we're expected to bear the increased production costs, if they banned imports of items made in sweatshops or by slave labor people would throw fits about how they can't get their coffee and chocolate and electronics anymore.

There's a post on here about how community river clean-ups don't actually make much of an impact on water pollution, because the major cause of water pollution isn't random trash but industrial and agricultural run-off. But the clean-ups are still extremely valuable because they get the community invested in the cause of water pollution, the community starts taking pride in their local environment and start actually caring about environmental regulations on a personal level, and that grants activists the buy-in to push for changes that actually can reduce water pollution.

We absolutely must get individual buy-in before we can expect systemic change. You can't solve systemic problems with individual action, but you can't solve them without it either. Making small changes to your consumption habits isn't going to fix the world, but it gets people invested in and connected to the cause, it makes them feel like they're part of a larger movement, and it primes them to think of these regulations as wins for that movement rather than a sacrifice being forced upon them by the government.

For example, the lesson taken from the "ban plastic drinking straws" initiatives is not "Most of the plastic waste in the oceans is fishing nets so don't even bother with consumer single-use plastics," it's "Most of the plastic waste in the oceans is fishing nets, if you want to actually make an impact, telling people to reduce their seafood consumption is more effective than banning drinking straws, and also drinking straws are a particularly bad type of single use plastic to focus on compared to encouraging people to use reusable shopping bags or look for glass or metal drink containers, because the share of plastic waste that drinking straws actually cause isn't worth making sure people think of you every time they're annoyed by a soggy cardboard straw.

Likewise, telling people to take 3 minute showers and let stale piss sit in their toilets for hours and stink up the house should be one of the last sources of water use you target because not only is it disproportionately annoying, but if somebody sees some fuckass office building running its sprinklers so much it's running off into the cutter at 2 PM in the middle of summer, this will create massive resentment against the government for restricting their water use while letting this happen, even if the office building is technically not supposed to be doing that.

A REAL Freddy Fazbear’s location is coming to the American Dream Mall in New Jersey in 2027!

“Freddy’s coming to Life”

For example on a post I made about leaving the way clear for people exiting elevators or public transportation instead of standing right in front of the door blocking it I got a few notes from people saying "haha yeah I always give someone a good body check if they do this and I love seeing the shocked and offended look on their face"

or on a post about leaving room for the flow of traffic I had people in the notes bragging about giving "body checks" to people in their way on a sidewalk or in a hallway.

Do. Not. Ever. Ever. EVER intentionally bump into people aka give them a "body check". Anyone who brags about this kind of behavior in my notes is getting blocked. You are literally physically assaulting someone and then bragging about it. Physically assaulting another person is actually a lot worse than accidentally being in someone's way, and I have no tolerance for it.

The times in my life where someone has intentionally "body checked" me have been when I was disassociating and/or about to pass out from low blood sugar, or quite literally was as far off to the side as possible (literally up against a wall or packed up against other people in a crowded area) and every time this has happened it has ended in me having a full blown panic attack that I need to take emergency meds to come down from due to my PTSD.

You never know why someone could be in your way. They could be visually impaired. They could be disassociating. They could be about to pass out from low blood sugar. They maybe just experienced a disturbing or traumatic event that's shut down their pre-frontal cortext. All sorts of things. So congrats I guess on physically assaulting someone who might be disabled or disassociating or about to faint from low blood sugar. You sure are showing them.

Not only that, but it's unsafe for you too. There are violent and unstable people in this world, and you might "body check" the wrong person one day. I had a friend in secondary school who would brag about this kind of behavior, and when I was talking to my aunt about it one day she said to me "one day your friend is going to do that to the wrong person and find herself cleaning herself up off the floor."

weight of rollator will depend on several factors , but 7 to 9 kg seem like fairly average guess . rollator users , naturally , can weigh 10 or ( many ) more times that . if balance of rollator user is thrown off , that rollator can easily glide ahead . given purpose as mobility aid , very likely for user to have at least one hand on rollator - which means that person will follow , and fall , and possibly get very hurt . this is true even with brakes on - brakes mean very little against full weight of person .

And yes, you are 100% correct, in the second or two you have to decide between those options, you might not notice a mobility aid, and if you go for option c for a mobility aid user you can seriously hurt them.

Also, not everyone who is physically disabled and at serious risk of being hurt from a "body check" uses a mobility aid. My mom really should be using a mobility aid, she has vertigo so badly she sometimes has to old onto my arm if we go anywhere together in public, and she has really bad arthritis in her feet that make it harder for her to walk at quicker than a shuffling pace. And yet because of her not wanting to look "too old" she refuses to use mobility aids, and insists on running errands by herself on days her vertigo isn't "too bad". But if someone were to get annoyed with my mother, who moves extremely slowly and often wobbles from side to side, and they decide to give her a "body check" due to their impatience, they could seriously hurt her.

Not everyone causing an inconvenient situation is being rude. Sometimes there's a reason they're just in the way like that, seemingly oblivious, and whatever is happening to them is beyond normal control.

But even if they WERE just being self-centered, that's no excuse to willfully become aggressive toward them. When you do, the only thing you prove is that you're a bully who cannot be trusted, which is far worse than simply being oblivious or self-absorbed.

It's on topic enough I think. I also prefer when people say excuse me instead of just staring at me. If I'm just standing there trying to decide on what brand of pasta sauce I'd rather someone say "excuse me" then stand there and stare at me. If nothing else because I find a stranger standing and staring at me to be unnerving and uncomfortable, but also it's just easier and gets it all over with quicker to just ask me to step aside for a second.

However, I understand that some people are non-verbal, so sometimes saying "excuse me" isn't a choice, which is why I don't recommend lashing out at someone for standing and staring instead of saying "excuse me". If you really want to say something, you can be polite about it. However, most people I know who do this are capable of verbalizing "excuse me", and if you are capable of saying "excuse me" I do recommend it because plenty of people find it unnerving and uncomfortable to be stared at by a stranger. Plus it saves you time to just say "excuse me" rather than spending all that time staring them down waiting for them to get the hint.

Now, what I really really hate is something I've seen people in my notes call "the German shuffle", except people in Iceland do it too (so presumably in other parts of northern / western Europe) and I cannot emphasize how much I hate it and how rude I think it is. It's where if someone wants to get something you're standing in front of they just slowly shuffle closer and closer to you to basically try to intimidate you away. I hate hate hate standing in the grocery store, trying to decide what kind of bread I want, and suddenly I can feel a perfect stranger's breath on the side of my face because they decided slowly shuffling closer and closer to me is the best method of getting me to move so they can grab whatever I'm standing in front of.

ART and Murderbot are excellent partners in mutual administrative assistance precisely because the features of their thinking, their existence as themselves, mesh so well together. They are not connecting despite their neurodivergences, but are enabled to support each other’s strengths and cover for each other’s weaknesses because of it.

ART’s overbearing processing power and huge knowledge base make it powerful tactical and medical support on Murderbot’s missions. Where ART gets caught up in detail and proving unknowns, Murderbot can take decisive, competent action with incomplete data. ART can speak up assertively, even aggressively, for Murderbot’s benefit when Murderbot’s anxiety prevents it from standing up for itself. ART might have difficulty with empathy, such as with processing the full emotional context of human media or intimidating every bot it meets, but Murderbot can provide that empathetic filter and act as intermediary. And the mutual extreme lengths that they will go to for each other are irrefutable evidence of the care they have for each other (proof of being loved which Murderbot’s anxiety and fear of abandonment cannot so easily dismiss).

I'm breaking character here, so don't tell anyone, but it was never actually in the book. the real sentence was "Claws the size of bananas shot toward me."

and then this was the edit note:

it's just that when I saw the edit note, my first impulse was to come up with an even worse banana sentence, and........ you all saw the bloodbath that followed.

here's the final line that made it into the book:

Then when bisexuals spoke up and were like "hey we actually do experience homophobia because we are often perceived as queer. Also I'm really uncomfortable with how I'm being treated in my own community" but I responded by spouting statistics about corrective rape and violence against lesbians (despite the fact they never denied the suffering of lesbians), while ignoring their actual objection, we could agree that would be a horrible and biphobic thing to do?

That header image made me suspicious so I reverse image searched it and sure enough:

BONUS ROUND: Oh look a pro-Russia simp too.

"Ambiguously brown" - frankly that's just lazy, that could be anywhere. Just say "brown" if you really have to.

"Ambiguously African" - okay you have a vague guess of a continent

"Ambiguously Central Asian" - plausible to narrow down on sight if you're very familiar with people from around this region

"Ambiguously Baltic" - this mf is either Latvian or Lithuanian, and I am intrigued by the fact that your estimate is this precise but you still aren't confident enough in your assessment to guess which one

reader: "so wait, was he white? black? hispanic? Samoan?"