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Last year, I was planning a house show with my bandmate. I get that most don't think it's very punk rock to mask, even though that's exactly how I conceptualize it. (Bandmate has said that it's one thing to be in literally any other context with me, a person who regularly masks, and an entirely different thing to see a band on stage where only one musician is masking next to the others who aren't. It would raise too many questions—are they sick??—and look as if I were making a statement for the whole band, one it doesn't necessarily endorse.) Luckily for me, we've mostly stuck to studio work, where there's no audience and less judgement. But for this show, I decided to assert myself a little more and try to be the non-conformist person I know I am deep down inside.

It was my task to write up the invitation. Assuming that people generally don't or just wouldn't mask even if someone asked them to, I compromised and decided to instead ask people something like, "please rapid test if you're able or skip the event if you're symptomatic." I sent the draft to my bandmate. They responded that they were not comfortable with telling people what to do. They told me that they had never heard of events where people were asked to test beforehand, that they were worried that people just wouldn't come if they read that (because *they* wouldn't), and most importantly that I was being weird and controlling of others. They argued that the only way asking people to go out and buy and take a covid test would make sense to them is if somebody immunocompromised or like, someone with cancer were wanting to attend the event. I reminded them of my high risk due to my medical history. We went back and forth for days but never reached a productive compromise. The show was cancelled. The friendship and working relationship are also pretty non-existent and it feels impossible to move forward. It also feels like I basically have to choose between staying covid conscious or pursuing music, but not both.

I'm trying to work out whether this is all an opportunity to raise my distress tolerance over being perceived as difficult, as you've written about, get comfortable with disappointing and challenging people while sticking to my values, and hold my ground while I exercise some noncompliance with friends (even if it means losing that friend and a whole working relationship),

OR

If what's really happening is that I'm just trying to impose my political ideals, or expect "perfect" politics and conduct from people in my life when it isn't really fair to do so. I mean, I'm sure my bandmate (who I've always pegged as neurodivergent and is someone who proudly states that they are anti-authority), would also say that they're trying to meet their own needs just like I am, and even call how they handled the situation with me as practicing productive noncompliance with people in their lives.

Thank you for all your writing, I'm sorry this couldn't be shorter, and any insights you might have would be greatly appreciated.

oh my fucking god, your friends/former bandmate are being so fucking unreasonable and projecting so much of their own insecurity onto you! All that you have done is try to set a standard for yourself and make requests that people be considerate and COVID conscious where they can be; your friend, in contrast, has tried to control your behavior because of the perceived optics that it might have for others and to limit your words and self-advocacy simply because the idea of making requests at all to others makes them feel uncomfortable.

they are the one who is being completely out of line here, and the things that you were trying to do are completely fucking normal and common in the punk and queer music scenes here in my city. here in Chicago it is routine to see people still masking at venues and events, including performers and event organizers, and it is quite common still for more socially conscious and COVID conscious music communities to exist and to request the people either test or mask at an event. I was just at a performance at a punk house that required that everyone rapid test before walking into the backyard or the party! that same party also provided free prep pills, birth control, and narcan to any attendees that needed it. providing masks and requiring tests is just part of the same gesture of commitment to community well-being.

Murderbot: Things I say in the shared working space stay in the shared working space!

ART: Murderbot 2.0 is part of you, it is the only one I told.

Murderbot 2.0: I needed help, Three is the only one I told.

A few ideas:

Braille and large print signs, maybe even tactile print someone who reads print could touch

Good lighting

Lighting under stairs/steps or high contrast steps if they exist at all

Elevators that talk, have tactile buttons rather than touch screen, and Braille labels

Tactile maps of the campus

Detailed maps and explanations of the communal bathroom situation, such as where are the sinks in relation to the stalls, how do the sinks work, where is the soap and how is it dispensed, how and where do you try your hands?

Buttons that open doors, maybe even doors that slide open and shut from the side instead of out or in

Hand rails on the walls similar to ones in hospitals, perhaps with lights under them?

the five stages of grief were never meant to be a checklist your character moves through in chronological order across three chapters. Let me save you from writing a grieving character who is simply having scheduled emotions:

⊹ Grief is not primarily crying. i know that sounds wrong but hear me out. a lot of grief looks like doing laundry. cooking something the person liked and then not being able to eat it. watching a show they recommended and never told anyone you finished it. grief goes very quiet and very domestic for long stretches and then ambushes you at completely unreasonable moments like a petrol station or a Friday at 4pm for no reason at all.

⊹ people who are grieving often seem fine. not because they're suppressing or being brave or in denial, but because humans are genuinely capable of functioning and being devastated at the same time. your grieving character can make jokes. can go to work. can have a good day. can feel guilty about the good day. can feel guilty about not feeling guilty. grief has a very active internal bureaucracy that has nothing to do with what's visible on the outside.

⊹ Grief also changes shape over time in ways that aren't necessarily about getting better. the first year is often adrenaline, there are things to do, people around, ritual and structure. year two is frequently harder because the adrenaline is gone and the world has moved on and expects you to have moved on with it. your character being more visibly undone eighteen months later than at the funeral is not a pacing problem. it's accurate.

clearly the selkie are on the move again, this is why they're the baddies in the San Andreas Shifters series

Two hundred years ago sealing was a thriving industry in this part of the country, and (like everywhere else) the local population of sea lions went extinct as a consequence. Back then there were a number of Māori settlements around the coast, but there was no city of Dunedin. The area was called Ōtepoti, which is now used as the Māori name for the city.

Now thanks to generations of environmentalist efforts the species is growing in number again, and starting around twenty or thirty years ago some sea lions from the subantarctic islands have rediscovered Ōtepoti as a place with lots of sheltered beaches that are good for raising pups.

The New Zealand sea lion comes further inland, as part of its natural behaviour, than any other pinniped species. But there wasn't a city here the last time they were breeding here.

Mother-to-be sea lions in particular like to look for sheltered little nooks to pup in, and buildings with their doors open look just like what they're after.

There's some people in the comments saying "fandoms have always been like this" and others saying "No, it's worse than it was." And both are to some extent right. Fans (or at least a small percentage of fans, and the larger a fanbase gets the larger a group this will describe) have always been Like That; but they did not always have the level of access to creators and actors that they have now.

The notion that a performer needs to be constantly available to public scrutiny, that their personal information should by default be available to any rando with google, is pretty new. It used to be that actors would only be expected to engage with the public on limited, specific, and controlled occasions, usually with security provided. Now they're being asked to rawdog exposure to the mob 24/7 on their own.

(Also, production companies have always always always been exploitative cowards, just to get that straight; reading the biographies of literally any actress from golden Hollywood years makes that clear. It's just, again, more public now.)

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.

One day a woman in her fifties came in. She looked at the pretty amphora displays and the sample cups before she turned to me. “What would go well with steak?”

“Oh, some of the fruit vinegars would be a nice finisher,” I said, talking out my ass. Like, I’d eat that but whether it’s conventionally accepted to douse a steak in mango vinegar is up for debate.

“I’ve been a vegetarian for forty years, but my doctor suggested I might need more red meat. So I thought I’d get a steak tonight and I don’t know much about preparing it.”

I stared at this woman. This fully adult human woman. Who had just spoken to a doctor. And I said, “Do not buy a steak tonight.”

“What? Why?”

“You’ve been a vegetarian for forty years?”

“Yes?”

“Then your body has no idea how to process meat. You will get so sick.” It was pure luck that I knew this. I had a few hardcore vegetarian friends who had been exposed to meat at potluck dishes and told me about the ensuing horrors as their gentle veggie gut biome was overrun with flesh. And how consequently their toilet overfloweth.

“Really?!”

“Yes,” I said, emphatically. “If you want to try to incorporate meat I would start with a tiny portion of fish, and slowly work your way up, but your insides will not know what to do with steak.”

“Wow! I’m so glad I mentioned that to you.”

Undated social media post by user Elias Thorne, replying to [censored]: "I hate how often I have to invoke this edit I made."

The edit in question is a cartoon of three people in a tree: one's head has been replaced with the elephant logo of the American Republican party, and the others' by the rainbow and trans flags respectively. The Republican is sawing off the branch that both of the other two are sitting on. The rainbow person, who's sitting nearer the trunk, also has a saw and is cutting off the trans person's seat.

Reply by a user whose handle starts with "Tower of snakes breakdo...":

Oh my god I haven't seen this before but yeah it's like I don't know how I could possibly make it any clearer, they are still going to hate you no matter how [censored] up you act towards your own community.