Hell Is Other People

TIME TRAVELER: i come from the future. what are your names?

ROMAN SOLDIER: my name is QUINTUS, as i am the fifth child in my family. my comrade is SEXTUS, for he was the sixth child in his family. what is your name?

TIME TRAVELER: my name’s LIV

to falling in love with her wife

to KISSING her WIFE

jasunmark is a white man with a beard. He says “So back in the late 80s and early 90s, when I was 20 and there was another friend dying of AIDS like, every three week- Yeah, seriously, those days were terrible. Young gay men now will just never know what it was like. But when a friend would die, we would all know exactly what to do. We’d get to their house as fast as possible, most of us already had a key, and we would know exactly where the smut was, we would know exactly where the stuff that they didn’t want their family to find. We would get it, and we would destroy it. Or, we would keep it for ourselves if it was cool, or we would donate it to something, I don’t know. It’s kind of a messed up memory, but back then we all just had to have each other’s backs, and yeah. This video just reminded me of that.

…oh wait no I went one further than considering it I did do it…

I ended up not going with the front fly closure, in part because the shortest opened ended metal zipper I could get was 40cm long and also TWELVE DOLLARS(!) but also because I got annoyed with trying to work out the equivalent of a waistband for the bust curve - this one has a button closure at the centre back but I think next time I would go to the effort of sewing a proper bra hook-and-eye closure because it is a bit hard to wrangle on and off.

Turns out sometimes the most evolutionary useful thing you can do is chill and not wear yourself to shreds, whether mammal or insect. It helps you deal with emergencies and adapt to change. Plus, you can act as living food storage!

Yeah, they spend 16-20 hours of the day laying around, socializing, raising Cubs and napping.

The last 4-8 hours are spent hunting.

Wait wait, they’re not a primate so they don’t count.

How about Orangutans?

Well, they spend 90% of their time awake just hanging out in food-rich areas, eating fruit and leaves, socializing, raising children, and chilling.

Well, they’re not people so it doesn’t-

How about Stone Age people in Europe?

They probably worked 3-5 hours per day, every day. (Though seasonal changes in food scarcity could change that)

Laborers in ancient Egypt worked 8 hours, with an hour break at lunch. They did this for 8 days, then rested 2 days. That sounds familiar. Except… they also had regular time off for festivals and holidays, and only worked for about 18 out of every 50 days.

Artisans in imperial Rome generally worked from 6am to Noon, and then had the rest of the day off… and only worked for half the year, due to all the holidays and festivals they got off.

But that’s too easy, what about a Peasant in medieval England?

6-8 hours per day, with Sundays off, Farm workers put in longer hours at harvest time but worked shorter days in winter when there are fewer hours of daylight. Economist Juliet Schor estimates that in the period following the Plague they worked no more than 150 days a year, due to the long holidays and many festivals.

Ugh, let’s go poorer. 17th century France. Starvation was afoot for the working poor!

During the reign of King Louis XIV, the workers of France had it tough, and hunger for the poorest was a fact of life. The typical working day was as much as 12 hours long, but two hours were set aside midday for lunch and perhaps an afternoon nap. Nevertheless, the Ancient Régime is said to have also guaranteed peasants, labourers and other workers a total of 52 Sundays, 90 rest days and 38 religious holidays off per year, meaning they worked just 185 out of 365 days.

So what changed?

The industrial revolution, baybe~~

New factory owners could work their employees to the bone due to a lack of regulation and abundance of cheap labour.

The typical factory worker in mid 19th-century England toiled away for a soul-destroying 16 hours a day, six days a week, 311 days per year!

THAT nightmare became the standard by which western society began to judge “work-life balance” and anything gentler than the industrial factory’s unfettered brutality is considered “softness”

(So many people died being mangled in those machines. Hair handkerchiefs went into style during American industrialization because working women would otherwise get their hair caught in the machines, and be either scalped or be bodily pulled inside to die…. But that’s a horror for another time)

Americans in 2020 worked an average of 8.5 hours per day on weekdays, plus another 5 hours on weekends.

Taking out federal holidays and weekends, we work 262 days per year. Most of us get 5-9 sick days to take per year. (Yes, a fixed number, no matter how sick you really are), and usually either no paid vacation, or 7-15 days paid vacation, depending on seniority and the company. Unpaid vacation doesn’t have a max, but taking it often risks you getting fired.

Even comparing against the poorest laborers in ancient history the current working structure for humans is, frankly, inhumane.

We are mammals. Let us rest. Let us celebrate holidays and attend festivals. Let us attend to our homes and families.

Even the ultra wealthy folks who got their heads chopped off gave us more time off than this!!!

Someone in the comments said something like “humans are instinctively industrious and productive, as social creatures!”

Buddy, that’s a lie fed to you by capitalism.

In our default state, we attend to our families yes, but we also party like hell, lounge around, and make fantastic works of art just to be proud of ourselves. We made beautiful things for the joy of creating them.

Stone Age humans may have spent a couple hours hunting and gathering, but DEFINITELY spent loads of time painting every available surface. Time and weather washed most of it away, but some places like Arizona and Colorado still preserve a few of the endless murals made by ancient hands.

Evidence shows that the ancient world was COVERED in paintings and etchings - just saturated with images of birds and beasts and humans, sunsets and cool weather. We invented mythologies and painted about them. We did something impressive, and painted about it. We taught our children how to paint and lifted them into our shoulders so they could mark the ceiling.

In our most base state, humans will work enough to survive, but our instincts demand we use all other time to create art. We want to communicate. To make connections.

“Working” or “being productive” is not on that list.

Make time to scrape off your car before you go. Scrape off all of your car. This means the roof and the rear windshield as well.

If the road looks wet but you’re not sure if there’s black ice, look at the wheels of the car in front of you. If you can see droplets flinging up, the water on the road is not frozen.

Your stopping distance will increase exponentially with how bad the weather is. Give yourself at least twice as much room to stop as you normally would.

If your car is going out of control and you HAVE to hit something, aim for something soft (snowbanks are softer than trees) and hit that thing at an angle.

Never get in the car without a coat, hat, and gloves.

If your car is out of control, look and steer where you want your car to go.

Take your car to an empty parking lot with snow in it and purposefully lose control. This will teach you how to handle your car.

If your car is real wheel drive, put something heavy in the trunk to give you better traction.

Take 5mph off the speed limit for bad weather, 10mph off for really bad weather.

For automatic transmission cars, the N in PRNDL stands for Neutral. This is the gear that your car should be in if you are trying to push it.

If you need to use your windshield wipers, your headlights also need to be on.

This button is your defroster: 

Please use your defroster if your windows are fogging up.

Ultimately, please just stay safe. Do these things not only for yourself, but to protect others on the road.

The second half, which we weren’t made aware of until the day we were meant to turn this one in, was to trade USB drives with the person sitting next to us and MODIFY their “unreadable” code without getting any help from them.

This was to teach us two things:

1) In this field, you’ll spend more time working with code written by other people than you will writing original code from a blank slate. The people who wrote the original code will probably not be around to help you. Learning to read code is IMPORTANT, even if it seems unreadable.

2) There is a strong brotherhood/sisterhood among programmers and software engineers. Respect that bond when you’re writing code and documentation. In my professor’s words: “When you write code, pretend that the person who will have to maintain it after you’re gone is a homicidal maniac who knows where you live.”