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Occasionally forget people genuinely think capitalism is thousands of years old

One time I was talking about Robin Hood with some coworkers and one guy was like “he was bad because the people he helped learned to expect handouts” and I wanted to be like… okay can you explain how that flawed capitalist propaganda applies to feudalism

reminder that capitalism was literally invented in the 16th century

That’s an exaggeration. What was invented in the 16th century was mercantilism. Capitalism really dates for the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the rise of industry and cash crops over artisans and merchants. Vulture capitalism, with the notion that companies have no duties other than generating profit, is even younger.

Capitalism is only 200 years old and I have to say, they have not been an impressive 200 years

I think a lot of this comes from the fact that most people don’t know the formal definition of capitalism. We all know the word, we’ve all seen the jokes, but very few people bother to actually define it unless they’re talking about political theory and philosophy, so it’s easy to end up with the impression that Capitalism = Money Can Be Exchanged For Goods And Services.

Capitalism is the economic system where most of the means of production (i.e. everything people need to have to make the stuff that everyone wants) are owned by private individuals or corporations, who then hire people to provide the labor necessary to produce things, with the intent of selling the output at a profit. It’s the difference between “you’re a carpenter and you make a chair and you sell it” and “you’re Richard Q. Richington who owns a chair factory, and you pay people to sell the chairs you paid other people to make and then all the excess money goes back to you.” There have been Richard Q. Richingtons on and off throughout history, but that being the norm for every single industry is a pretty recent development.

An alarming amount of people seem to think capitalism = all trade, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Besides Batman guys I've now got another type of guy in my notes trying to show off by saying that of course it's silly to assume that all comics are Batman when there's also Superman, Aquaman, and the Flash, not to mention Marvel Comics,

It's really funny to me how the prevalent stereotype of "someone who doesn't play D&D" is that of a snobby indie RPG blowhard who will gladly recommend you fifteen different flavors of one-page lyric RPGs about lesbian robots making soup together, when in reality the median RPG enjoyer who doesn't play D&D is "person who knows that Vampire the Masquerade, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, and maybe GURPS exist"

...does this make me Aquaman Guy?

Sticking to the original thought exercise of Batman Guy, you are too broadly knowledgeable about RPGs and open to playing a wide variety of them to be just an Aquaman Guy. But if you mean that in the sense of obsessed with Aquaman (Vampire the Masquerade) to an unhealthy degree, then I too am an Aquaman Guy.

multiple people have come to me asking for my help in optimising their VtM characters, and then when I bust out obscure shit from the Dark Ages Tome Of Secrets or the Tal-Mahe-Rah splatbook that comboes together efficiently, they respond with confused trepidation. (At one point I put together a gangrel with -10 difficulty to rolls to track people, and this was unfortunately not even that build's final form).

I'm not sure what this says about me, but I think it probably says something.

Can you help me make my Ventrue?

Sometimes college professors like to hop on my posts lamenting the sorry state of syllabi these days and joke about how they haven't thought that far ahead in the course themselves, or talk about how they struggle to complete a schedule for their students.

With all due respect, that's your job. If you can't do your job, you should have a different job. If you need help, ask your colleagues or your department chair or *someone* because I know that professors aren't given a hell of a lot of education on how to educate, so you probably *need* help.

But every single time I make one of those posts I get anywhere from ten to thirty messages, replies, reblogs, and asks say "oh man, that's exactly why I had to drop out of school; I couldn't keep up with the assignments because I didn't know when they were due until the week they were due."

I have been a college student in three separate decades, and "not having a schedule of assignments in the syllabus" is new to my experience. That shit didn't fly in the 2000s or 2010s and I think it likely has to do with professors being overly reliant on apps.

AT A MINIMUM your syllabus should have:

Your assignment schedule doesn't necessarily need to have the exact page numbers of every reading or a full assignment sheet for each project, but it should have things like:

December 1st - Major Project 3 second draft due December 9th - Quiz 10 December 12th - Major Project 3 final draft due December 15th - Final Exam

If you end up presenting a more thorough schedule with readings and homework later, that is acceptable to present a week or two into the semester but it is absolutely insane to me that students these days don't know what homework they're going to have to get done over Thanksgiving break during the first couple weeks of class.

If I had three professors at once who didn't give me a schedule, how on earth would I know if I was going to have to read three chapters of a novel, take a midterm and turn in two stats homework assignments, and complete a history research paper the same week that I'm planning to travel to see family? If I'm aware of this from the beginning of the semester I can make sure not to pick up extra shifts, or I can plan to leave a day later to accommodate the midterm, or I can start working on the paper early to complete it before the due date but if I don't know what's going to be due when, I'm going to have a big problem.

If you don't give your students a schedule you are communicating that you don't care about their schedule, and that you think it's their responsibility to contort their life (and their job, and their other classes) around your class, and honestly my advice to students in that situation is "drop in the first week and pick up another class". That's actually part of why I recommend signing up for one more class than you can really manage - if you get a professor whose class looks like it's going to be a disaster because they don't have a schedule, you can bail before the withdrawal period and get a refund for the class.

I'm only in one class this semester but the professor's response has fully dropped me into "Fuck it, I guess I'll fail" mode and I don't even know if I can pull myself out of my current D grade because I don't know how many assignments we have left in the semester.

This is a shitty way to run a class. If you can't do better than this, you shouldn't be running a class.

Professors who use Canvas or any other canvas/blackboard/whatever online tool to post assignment sheets and accept work come to rely on the tool instead of writing a syllabus.

"Well it's in the modules"

Cool do you have visibility on for all of the modules from the start of the semester? That is definitely worse than just having one schedule to write things down from but I can work with it.

Or do you only reveal the modules a few days before they start, so the first week you have week one and two available? Because that means that I can only plan out one week in advance, which is not enough time for me to know whether I'll be okay to go to my hobby meetup on the first friday of next month or if I'll have a major assignment due at midnight that day. Was I planning on using a weekend six weeks into the semester to go visit my sister? Too bad because after I've paid for plane tickets I found out that you scheduled a project that I need specific equipment for to be due on that Sunday.

Also: you are a college professor. You shouldn't keep your modules hidden because you should allow your students to work ahead.

"But they might do things poorly, or in a way that I don't want them to." Well warn them about that and then let them fall on their face if they have to. They ARE adults and they can figure out whether they'll be able to work ahead successfully or will cope with the results if they fuck up. But if you hide the assignments and they just experience your class as something that happens to them, not something they can plan for and anticipate and prepare for, everyone is going to have a bad time.

When I was getting my bachelor's degree there was some kind of administrative screwup and I ended up not taking a 200-level critical theory class until my last semester of undergrad. It was a prereq for a lot of classes and mandatory to graduate but it just slipped under the radar.

The professor assigned us a $300 literary theory textbook and said "you're going to need this for the rest of your time in college, so it's important to invest in this book" (for the record, it was not - I almost never referenced foundational literary theory papers in my college career, and after 200 level was never instructed to write any paper through a specific critical lens) but the rest of my time in college was the ten weeks of that class. I did not need to buy a $300 ($200 used) book on literary theory.

But the professor had given us a syllabus. And the syllabus included a VERY complete assignment schedule, including the page numbers of all the readings for the semester, which included lots of standalone essays that we had institutional access to AND the 70 or so pages assigned from the $300 textbook.

So I packed up my nice camera and I reserved a room in the library and I took the reference copy of the book that the library had and I took photos of every page that was assigned; when I got home I assembled the readings into PDFs that I labelled with the date that the reading was due.

That quarter I was taking five classes and planning my wedding. I got married a week after graduation. Five classes on a quarter system schedule meant that I was taking 21 units. I was working full time, and I had recently fractured two vertebrae and occasionally missed class because I couldn't stand upright and walk on campus.

The ONLY way I survived that quarter was by sitting down after the first week of classes and taking four hours to write out every single assignment, reading, group project, and exam date in a schedule that I carried with me constantly and referenced obsessively.

If I had had just one professor that quarter who hadn't provided me with a schedule of assignments it could have very well tanked my performance in all of my classes and delayed graduation.

I hear plenty of professors complaining online about students these days, but I can hardly blame students these days being checked out when so many professors these days are checked out as well.

You're right, and you should say it. Admittedly, most of your profs are also underworked and underpaid--that's a huge crisis of adjunctification--but that doesn't mean that having a good syllabus isn't crucial for everyone's sanity during the semester, including your fucking profs'.

A good syllabus is a structure that you, the teacher, can collapse onto. It means knowing that the exam will be on X day, so you'd better have that exam written by X-7 days and proofed before it needs to be printed. It means that when you're exhausted and cranky because a student is whining at you and you just want everything to die in a fire, you have a Rule printed out to go by, and if the student whines more, you can point to the Rule. (The Rule should be as fair as you can manage when you are well rested and well fed and have met none of your students yet, anticipating everything that might happen to a well meaning student approaching the class in good faith over the course of the year, including "my abusive boyfriend is trying to sabotage my performance", "my house burned down", and "I am having a medical or mental health crisis and I have no idea how to handle it." This doesn't necessarily mean that the Rule should be unfair to other students, but you should have a thought out plan for what happens when Life hits your students and ideally a policy that can absorb a certain amount of Life without your needing to deal with it personally.)

The syllabus is something you might need to amend as you go, but you should always know where you are in the class and what you want your students to take away and internalize from each lecture. You should prioritize accordingly on your test materials and project rubrics, too. If your exams or projects have any flexibility (i.e. short answers, essays, etc.) whatsoever, you should write the rubric at the same time as you write the exam. Then you grade ten answers/projects by that rubric. Does it need adjusting? Is there a common problem you didn't anticipate? Adjust it now, re-grade those ten answers if necessary, and use the rubric evenly.

These elements of course structure are things that an educator, especially a neurodivergent educator rolling with chaotic expectations on the fly, needs in order to be effective. They aren't optional or fluff that can be cut. If the apps make that harder for you to achieve, the thing to do is step away from the damn app.

FRAN KRANZ as MARTY in THE CABIN IN THE WOODS (2011) — dir. Drew Goddard

5 simple exercises to awaken dormant muscles

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I appreciate this video a lot--people don't realize how important it is to start slow if you're trying to come back from a completely sedentary lifestyle, and they get really hurt as a result. Straining your muscles too much, too suddenly can land you in the E.R. and the wrong joint injury can permanently affect your mobility, so please start with absolute basics and easy stretches!

nodding furiously at every second of this video

I hope she never finds out about the Netherlands.

What's so bad about "Netherlander"???

The only demonym I've ever heard for the Netherlands is "Dutch".

Just something I really want to share on here because it’s important.

this is really important to remember, even if you said something stupid and don’t feel like repeating it- it can still feel isolating to folks with hearing and auditory processing problems!

When you say “it wasn’t important”, you leave out the rest of the sentence.

“It wasn’t important enough for me to try to include you because you are not worth the extra effort on your own”

He is smiling because he got a cool new hat

everybody say happy birthday pumpkin

Now, more than ever, we need to be careful about spreading misinformation and rumors

I can guarantee that over the next few months, we'll be hearing about a lot of alarming things going on here in the US. Some of those things will be true, and some won't. (And some will have both true and false or exaggerated elements.)

It's going to be absolutely vital that important information is not drowned out by misinformation, rumors, and ragebait.

That means, when you see something that would be important if true, before sharing, you check whether it's actually true.

In library world, we use the acronym SIFT:

Usually you don't need to do all four things: just STOP and then pick what makes sense from the other three. If you decide to share the information, you can also say what you did--"This is a firsthand account from XYZ protest; it lines up with what the local TV station is saying, but has a lot more details about what the cops did," or whatever.

The more urgent the information seems, the more important it is to make sure it's reliable.

If we're hearing every other day that this or that vulnerable group is in immediate, life-threatening danger--but 49 times out of 50 it turns out to mean Trump rambled somewhere about something which, if actually implemented, could end up having the described consequences at some point down the line--then people aren't going to know the difference the one time in 50 when the danger really is immediate.

Think, here, things like immigration crackdowns, CPS investigations into parents who affirm a trans child's gender, or demands that health care providers report miscarriages to law enforcement. We all know that these are things Trump World talks about a lot and would like to be able to do, in some form. For the sake of the people affected by these topics, we need different ways of talking about, "Here they are, back on their bullshit," versus, "This is a policy proposal for a real thing that could happen," versus, "Holy shit, grab the kids and run."

We cannot go to "Holy shit, grab the kids and run" every time Trump, or someone in his inner circle, decides to bloviate about something that could disastrously affect people lives. The people who are most in danger can't stay at DefCon 5 every day of their lives, and when they do really have to grab the kids and run, we need that alarm to be heard over the constant background hum of dread.

The same goes for action items--whether protests, ways to help, or little things people can do to stay safe/sane. There's going to be plenty going on, and nobody is going to be able to do everything, so do your part by passing along those things that you can vouch are true and important, and skipping the things you aren't sure about.

I'll leave you with an example. Remember how a few years ago, we were all-in about hand hygiene and disinfecting surfaces? And then it turned out that those were not actually very important in terms of preventing the transmission of COVID-19, and what we really need is better air filtration in public spaces--but, at my work at least, we still have canisters of surface-disinfecting wipes sitting around, and tattered old signs up about hand hygiene, and no air filters.

At the time, early in the pandemic, we were sharing the best information we knew about how to stay safe, but people got a little too fixated on that initial advice--remember how people would wipe down their groceries? And those little sticks for pressing elevator buttons?--and then when the advice changed, they didn't want to hear about it.

Distrust, fatigue, superstitious attachment to the old grocery-wiping ways--there were a lot of reasons, but the key thing to take away is that attention, energy, and goodwill are all finite resources. Try to avoid wasting it with grocery-wiping--or worse, shilling for the guy selling little sticks to press elevator buttons with.

i dont consider myself a 'fashion guru' by any means but one thing i will say is guys you dont need to know the specific brand an item you like is - you need to know what the item is called. very rarely does a brand matter, but knowing that pair of pants is called 'cargo' vs 'boot cut' or the names of dress styles is going to help you find clothes you like WAAAYYYY faster than brand shopping

this also goes for aesthetic or -core titles. 'y2k tank top' is going to get you resellers and fast fashion brands advertising to people looking to meet a current trend. 'thin strap crop tank top' is going to get you a diverse group of results and not upcharge you to hell and back

additionally, shop second hand when you can, second hand and thrift sites typically organize clothes by the cut and color. theyll be more affordable than a depop seller curating you a style to sell you

useful terminology for different kinds of clothing shapes :)

This episode was gold

using "what were YOU doing at the devils sacrament" to mean "yeah i made an embarrassing reference but you understood it which is also embarrassing" is very funny to me

my favorite part is that absolutely nobody says this except here. so if you use it in public, it's a dead giveaway that you spent the last ten years on tumblr. but then again, they recognized it, which means they were at the devil's sacrament

Hey, also, all the anarchist shit aside, tomorrow I want you to make something.

I forced myself to draw something after the 2016 election. I forced myself to draw something when my mother died in 2018. I forced myself to draw something when my spouse was hospitalized for multiple organ failure in 2021.

When you are miserable, make something. Add a row to your project, bake a box cake, draw on a sheet of lined paper, write a poem on a napkin, fold an origami shirt out of a dollar bill, make your favorite recipe for dinner, but make something with your hands, something that you can hold and look at engage your senses in.

It won't fix the world, but it will change the world. You will have made something that didn't exist before. You will have impacted your reality, even in a very small way. And it is going to be something you made *after.* Something bad happened, something shook you, and you made something after, in spite of it.