A bizarre little man, from nowhere, belonging to nothing

presented without comment etc 

Please fucking lie to your employer. Like they don’t need to know your mental health issues or what drugs you do. Ffs

its not lying if its to employers or cops

and look up ur rights on what they can and cannot ask u many places ban asking about ur record and transportation status and things like that resources will also tell u how they reword sketchy questions so ur prepared

Hey. Take it from a former HR person… this goes double right now. I just spent some time putting in some job applications myself (not for HR, lol) and got about 15 interviews. And idk if it’s because of COVID uncertainty or if places just don’t fucking care anymore because they know people are desperate for work, but the amount of straight up illegal shit my interviewers asked me was appalling. (That’s not even counting the questions that were technically legal but clearly fishing for information they’re not legally allowed to ask.)

A tame example? Two questions into a phone interview, the guy on the other end of the line asked: “How old are you?” I said “Excuse me?” - giving him a chance to rethink that. He didn’t. “How old are you?” “Sir, you are not allowed to ask me that question.” “Well, I want to know. I’m asking.” “And you’re legally not allowed to ask me that. I’m not required to tell you my age.” At that point, I guess he managed to remember an old HR bulletin or something (I hope to god he wasn’t actually HR himself), and he said, “Well, I need to know if you’re over the age of 18.” (Which is what he should have asked in the first place… or not, since that was in the application that he could have read.) “Yes. I’m over the age of 18.”  And we moved on. Two questions later, he tried another illegal question. I called him on it again and ended the interview, citing that a workplace with such a clear disregard for the law, especially upon first contact with a potential employee, was not going to be a good fit. (They offered me the job anyway, lol. I didn’t send a thank-you or a response.)

At a different interview, the majority of questions were “fishing” questions - just looking for that info they’re not actually allowed to ask. (This person was also either not really HR or an HR person who was exceptionally bad at their job.)

I could tell they were getting frustrated when I dodged answering the personal stuff, and they actually got extremely upset when I mentioned later in the interview (re: less relevant work experience) I had worked in HR. They were super flustered for the remainder of our time, and I watched them skip over questions on their sheet they had clearly planned on asking. They KNEW they were being sketchy and were counting on me not knowing anything about HR - or my rights - and so they got upset when I did. These were super tame examples. I’m begging you, if you’re job searching right now, PLEASE know your rights. Please know what interviewers are allowed to ask. Please don’t volunteer information or elaborate more than you’re required to about personal things. Save your words (and everyone’s time) by elaborating why you’re good for the position/what you can do. I may create a resource list on this shit later but PLEASE PLEASE KNOW THIS STUFF BEFORE YOU TALK TO AN EMPLOYER. This goes for anywhere you’re interviewing as well as your current employer. This also goes for HR. HR may be the person you go to when shitty stuff happens, but that doesn’t mean they’re your friend (or competent). They don’t need to know your age (beyond 16+, 18+, or 21+, depending on the job). They don’t need to know your medical history. (For the love of god, do NOT answer the “have you been diagnosed with depression?” question.) They don’t need to know if you have kids or whatever. They don’t need to know a LOT of those things that may appear on an application, including your veteran status, whether you’re on/have been on unemployment, etc. They’re not entitled to know specifics about your transportation (unless you’re using that transportation for the job, like Uber/delivery drivers). Look this up for your state/the job’s state. Beware questions like “What year did you graduate?” if you’re like me and don’t put dates on your resume (I just put amount of time spent at employers, not dates of employment). They’re fishing for your age. It’s “Oh, you know, 100 years ago,” if you feel comfortable making a joke, or “About [generic number, like 5 or 10] years ago” if not. Also beware things like the “What do you do in your free time?” question, even if you already work there. This is not a friendly getting-to-know-you question. This is a basis for judgement. Not up to an invisible standard? They’re going to be biased against you for pay raises, promotions, etc. Mention kids/lots of family/social engagements? That’s a tick against you for not being the kind of person who lives to work (yes, it’s gross and stupid). Mention lots of solitary things? Cool, that’s their mental note to ask more from you because you’re “not doing anything anyway.” By all means, be friendly with your coworkers/talk about shared interests if you want, but it is none of your boss’s business, and be aware what could get back to them.  Don’t. Tell. Employers. Shit.

We wrote up a handy list of those illegal questions here:

10 Questions You Should Never Be Asked in a Job Interview 

Hopefully people already know this by now, but I saw way too often back when I worked in retail. Don’t add your coworkers or boss on social media. Yes, your coworkers too. You don’t want to accidentally say something to them or have them see a post and mention it to your boss. I’ve seen it happen.

Just putting this out there.

just finished reading american psycho. crazy stuff.

sorry. neurodivergent*

Our Hextech dream.

“what is doctor odyssey about” I am being 100% serious when I say it is about being bisexual and hedonistic on a boat. it’s literally about how the world pretty much sucks but you can and should still carpe diem by having sex with your coworkers. on a boat.

[tumblr] is a beautiful website where all kinds of people come to diversify their echolalia

mutuals can always dm me but be warned i talk like your coworker who is trying too hard to get to know you and my response times are akin to the response times you might get if we were communicating by letter

me every single time i’m on the edge of going fully insane about a new fandom: haha what if i just checked ao3. just for fun. just to see what there is. i won’t save anything or get in too deep i’ll just do some recon. i’ll just go see. for fun

being a writer leads to a genuinely helpful but also very stupid kind of mindfulness where you'll be having a sobbing breakdown or the worst anxiety attack of your life and think "okay, I really need to pay attention to how this feels. so I can incorporate it into my fanfiction."

queer people on this site really make me feel like a confused straight guy at pride. the discourse here could kill a man

"why polyamorous people aren't valid" "mspec lesbians AREN'T okay actually" "aroallos are freaks" "he/him dni. cis men dni" "this post is for non-men only" yessss and the one with long hair goes in the girl box, then the one with short hair goes in the boy box!!

maybe I'm just a boring he/him white guy but inventing about 7 trillion terms to define "man" and "woman" so you can reinforce gender essentialism isn't very "love is love" of you. maybe i just don't have a sexuality but picking and choosing what sexualities are normal and which ones are "weird and predatory" sounds like we're all a bunch of republicans on fox news. if you attend your local pride parade and look REAAALLLYYY closely, you'll notice you can't actually tell if someone's gay or not from their appearance, and there's no way to know if they're "invading queer spaces". maybe it's just me, but when i attended my local gaybar last night for the drag show, they didn't ask for my gay-card with a peer reviewed diagnosis of faggot stamped on it. they just let me in the building. i live a life of bliss and luxury in not caring about any queer discourse ever, and just going "WHATEVER MAKES YOU HAPPY :-)" while booting up the latest cod game. and it seems much more fun than whatever the fuck you people are on about

muting my notifs for this post but i need to acknowledge this first. My favorite tags fr 🙏

I was worldbuilding two bog standard fantasy species, wise old tree dudes and impulsive little rat guys, when I realized it was far funnier if they had each other's personalities.

The rat guys think fast and talk fast, but they're incredibly conservative and like to cover all the angles before they take any action. This comes with being a prey species: their ancestral environment had lots of clever traps and devious hazards, so you get rat councils wisely working the problem.

The tree dudes speak and move slowly, but they will propose and then do the most insane things you can imagine. They can slot together a rocket in an afternoon and will then use it without so much as a test fire first. They test new potions by quaffing them down, sometimes not even waiting for it to cool (though they're tree dudes, so I guess quaffing a potion just means pouring it over their root legs). This comes from the ancestral selection process too: the tree dudes that won were the ones that took big risks, that grew faster, stronger, and tried new things without worrying about consequences. The tree dudes evolved in an era when they had no natural predators and their only competition was each other.

And this is, of course, initially confusing for any human who makes contact with them. If a giant bearded tree nods at you solemnly and tells you to go through a portal, your first thought is not that he's curious about what will happen to spacetime. And if a hyperactive little rat guy tells you with some urgency that you must accompany him into a ruined city, you won't immediately think that this is step 11 of his branching 27 step plan.

Would being called big dog fix me? Who knows?

Mixed reviews

"What's up, big dog; I'm ratsmacker" is going to live rent free in my head for a little while

Boys who up smacking they rat?

you can sit in the kitchen and have strange memories

transphobes are on a different plane of existence than the rest of us how do you manage to come to these conclusions

???????????? genuinely how do these people think science works like do they still believe in bloodletting