oh you know it's all latestage capitalism but the thing is. how are you supposed to be a person inside of this. a person trying to be a better version of yourself.
oh, you started working young, which was kind of hard, but it's just the way stuff works sometimes. and it was 2008 and your family couldn't afford heat. but it's fine, you grow a spine and get used to the professional world and besides it was the suburbs we're talking about here, like, your life could have been actually hard, so what if your father lost his job and you can't afford to move or turn the lights back on. and once you start making money, it's good. you keep doing that. because now they're relying on you. so you have to do that.
oh you were in thousands of dollars of debt at 17 years old so that you could go to school, because you have to go to school if you want to get a "real" job. you even did it "right", you worked parttime and attended community college before you transferred to a public school. you were under so many merit scholarships.
which is fine. you pick yourself up and you say like, okay. i graduated college. i'm holding down a job. i'm doing the Adult Thing, which looks and acts like this, according to all the books i've read. you start with the shitty job and then you climb that corporate ladder.
but the shitty job doesn't cover rent and you stretch yourself too-thin so you get sick. good luck with that. the shitty job no longer pays for your meals. everyone asks why you don't just move, but there's nowhere to move to. and with what money are you going to be moving? and then the loans come back, because they were never going to forgive them, because you were 17 and trying to do the right thing, which was stupid. people are now saying you shouldn't have even gone to school.
which is fine. but because you have no other option, so you do the shitty job, and you apply every day for like 5 new ones, and despite the fact everyone says "there's no one who wants to work!" it's actually just that nobody is fucking hiring so you can either work for 13 dollars an hour in the shitty place you know (where at least you have a passingly friendly relationship with the manager) or you can start from scratch again with a different 13 dollars an hour without knowing how much abuse from the new job you'll be taking.
and if you quit you lose your insurance. if you quit you lose your housing. if you quit, you'll be another burnout kid. the lazy ones. these assholes, look at them!
and you come home to a family dinner and you hear from your father the same old thing. how he worked hard at his job and yes it sucked for a while but he was able to provide for the family and then the house and the dog and the rest of barbie's dream vacation. how the insurance did cover some of it. how you just really need to start speaking up more in manager conversations so they know you're a go-getter. you want to tell him - did you know we're actually doing more now hourly than any previous generation? - but you can't remember where you heard that statistic, and you're far too tired for the fucking argument. and then he starts in on his usual bit. where's the house? where's your kids? where's your ambition.
the same job the same money the same hours doesn't do it anymore. the same nose-to-the-grindstone now just shreds your face off. there's no such thing as upwards mobility, not really. and as far as you're aware, the money certainly is not trickling. you do the soulless stupid shit you signed up for because you fucking have to or else you literally risk your life (food, the apartment, the insurance), but it's not getting you anything. you download the stupid "save more" app and you budget and you do every right thing and then the price of eggs is 7 dollars and you say - oh great! another thing i have to fucking worry about now!
and you go to your stupid job and everyone in your father's generation just tells you to be better about being an adult. they have their homes and their savings account and their bailout and they say. well have you tried not drinking starbucks. well your generation just spends too much on clothing. well you might just be too addicted to travelling. and you - because you need the job - you bite your tongue and don't say i am being held prisoner and you're suggesting i stop pacing my cell if i don't like the scenery and you don't say what the fuck do you think i've been doing with my money and you don't say i haven't spent a cent on something nice in literally forever much less coffee you arrogant asshole. you open and close your bank app and check your loans and check your credit score and check fucking zillow and ziprecruiter and apartments.com just one time more. and still they give you that demeaning little grin and say - see, what you need is -
what you need is for your meds to stop being so fucking expensive. what you need is for the housing bubble to explode into dust. what you need is for billionaires to choke on their wealth. what you need is actual help. what you will get is more economic advice from people who are older-and-wiser.
and above you, almost in a glimmer, you can see the wedged smile of your debt getting toothier, wider.
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today, my coworkers’ refusal to see me as a man put one of our patients in a position where they felt unsafe for the third time. i’ve been at this job for less than two months total. i don’t even care about getting misgendered anymore, i just want the people we’re supposed to be taking care of to feel comfortable around me.
i work at a hospital where we have to supervise our patients in a lot of vulnerable situations. there are safeguarding rules in place for certain things that male employees aren’t allowed to be present for when it comes to female patients. and yet, the people training me and telling me what to do have repeatedly put me in situations where i’ve been forced to do things that the female patients aren’t comfortable with me doing. and because they have repeatedly failed to teach me the rules for doing my job as a man, i have no way of knowing when i’m crossing one of those lines unless one of the patients tells me.
i’ve had to watch a victim of SA stare at me in abject terror as my coworkers asked her to strip naked with me still in the room. it took several minutes for her to even be able to speak enough to ask if i could leave the room. i found out after that she broke down crying the moment i walked out. my biggest regret is that i didn’t realize what was happening fast enough to leave before she ever had to say something, because she shouldn’t have had to say it. i never should’ve been allowed in the room in the first place, because that’s not something male employees are supposed to be present for. but i didn’t know that yet, because i was training and i thought surely, they wouldn’t train me to do something that directly violated their own safeguarding rules. that moment was the first time, and it’s haunted me ever since, but it wasn’t the last time. not only did it happen for the third time today — it almost happened for the fourth, and would have if someone hadn’t spoken up to say they should pick someone else. i care for these people so deeply, it’s why i took this job, and i’m so tired of hearing the fear in their voices when they have to ask me not to do something i never should’ve been told to do.
i’m very used to the personal discomfort of being misgendered. i willingly deal with it a lot at work as well as in other situations, not because i’m in the closet (at this point in my medical transition that would be impossible), but because it’s such a frequent occurrence with my coworkers that we would never get anything done if i took the time to correct them every time. but to see it get to the point of causing such visceral discomfort in other people? people i’m supposed to be taking care of and keeping safe? that’s something else entirely, and i’m fucking exhausted.
and after all of that, some of them still look at me like i have two heads when they tell me what to do and i say “i can’t do that, only female employees can” because i’m learning now. clearly i’m already seen as a man by our patients, but my coworkers would still rather put them in an unsafe situation than just train me as a man.
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That viral post that's going around about how people who write "book quality" mlm fic are too "normal" to publish and have real jobs so only "weird" people publish their "shitty" fanfic is so completely out of touch with reality and I am giving a massive side eye to everyone reblogging it.
Not only is it completely, easily verifiably untrue (you cannot enter any professional writing space without tripping over a dozen grizzled scifi writers who got their start by filing off the serial numbers and publishing their Star Trek fanfic even going back decades ago??? it's a whole thing?? plus how can you look at the mlm category on Amazon right now and say with a straight face that people aren't publishing shitty Spirk and Stucky fanfic??? Oh, honey...) it's also the perfect example of this kind of sneering elitism that true artists would never sully themselves by seeking profit, they do it only for the purity of the thing that always somehow leads back to, "no one should be paid to make art, actually."
The only reason you're seeing more published fanfic right now has nothing to do with the idealistic purity of your hypothetical government employee written smut of the past vs the debased scribbles of those awful straights of today and everything to do with the fact that a) self-publishing has created a voracious readership that wants a ton of content so it's become a viable, flexible income stream for many, especially disabled people b) anyone can publish now with self-publishing tools so there are less gatekeepers and c) lockdown got a lot of people into fandom and therefore writing who never tried it before.
And if you really think there's no "shitty" published mlm and no "book-quality" m/f writing out there that started as fanfic, then you are clearly not a reader so why are you even talking about this?
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Rick Astley Is Haunting You
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Someone bets Tucker he can’t hack into a hero’s patrol playlist and sneak a Rick Roll in there. He does, easily, and finds that said hero has horrible music taste.
So he sets out to hijack every hero’s music playlist he can find and rate their music tastes on a chart, sometimes adding in his own music or joke songs he thinks they’d like. It only gets back to the heroes when Tucker posts a video with his rankings. Up until then, they thought it was another hero or new villain messing with them. Not a civilian??
(Nightwing’s playlist is sixth on the list, and he’s furious about it.)
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I should add poledancing to the list of odd talents that Akira has but has no business having due to growing up in a small suburban town. I only had access to it bc i had a YMCA that had a MASSIVE gym (in a criminally underfunded part of the city); there were poles put up alongside some other structures to allow counselors to make up some shit for us to do lmao
Hes got a flair about him; speaking from experience, it is FUN to do gymnastic shit like that, and its really really REALLY good for ur core. Other things on the list are basic gymnastics (he hates that shit tho, the classes he took sucked ass), Parkour (loves this; less about running and more about utilizing ur core and bracing for falls), and Knife Flipping/Spinning. Theyre all odd things that coincidentally ended up being VERY good experience for the metaverse :) YEAH the metaverse makes it easier to pull off tricks, but he already knew how to do all those things; you cant get Ryuji or Yusuke to spin kick off a pole wo having them fall and bust their ass- Its ALL skill babey
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