Kitten Night Farts

You should be furious that people trying to escape genocide in Gaza, Sudan, Congo all need raise an absurd amount of money just to survive

You should be furious at how these people went through atrocity after atrocity and still need raise tens of thousands of dollars to get away

You should be furious at this insidious thing that completely encapsulates how capitalism feeds off of blood

hey boss i can't come in today it's a sunny day and there's a lovely breeze coming in through my window, yeah it's rustling the branches of the tree outside that's finally bloomed so it's pretty serious

Yeah quiet quitting is great and all but have you tried chaotic working?

Like. I remember back in my grocery store cashier days I did so much crazy shit.

When WIC (Women, infants, and children voucher program to help low income mothers/families with children) people were in my line I would pretty much know who they were. Before the cards they had to tell us upfront they were WIC and show us their vouchers for what they were allowed to get (it was awful some times. Like. 2 gallons of milk. $4 worth of vegetables etc etc). They’d always have items hanging back, waiting to see what the total was and if they would have to take it off the belt.

I began to place the fruits/vegetables a certain way on the register scale so that like 1/2lbs of grapes read as like .28lbs or something. Then act shocked when I said that they still had X amount of lbs left. They got all their fruit and vegetables.

I think it started to kinda? Catch on to the women? Because I would have the same moms in my line month after month. And even after they switched to the cards (they worked like food stamp cards?) I’d still do the same thing. They were able to get more produce for whatever shitty max amount Indiana gave them.

Anyways. Be chaotic. It’s more fun that way.

Good on you, op.

due to inflation you must answer my riddles five

due to budget cuts i will grant you two wishes

due to recent layoffs there is only one of me and I lie 50% of the time

I have just realised that "nobody wants to work any more" is true, but the 'nobody' in this case is large companies.

They don't want to do any of the things which aren't absolutely essential to getting a product slapped together and shoved out the door so they can get your money. They don't want to do testing, write documentation, train their staff, provide support, give a good customer experience, none of it. Anything they can automate, or farm out to third parties, even if the results are terrible, they will. Because it's cheaper and all they care about is making the number go up.

Usually there is a way to contact support/customer service (eventually) but when you do, they can't actually help due to having not had sufficient training to know anything and not having the ability to escalate anything. All most of them can do is read the meaningless blather off the company's web site for you.

But more and more they just don't provide any way to contact them. There's no law which says they have to, is there?

And what else are you going to do, go with a competitor? Even if a viable competitor exists, they're all the same.

Go without the thing? Good luck with that, a lot of this stuff has become essential to modern life.

I mean none of that is new information, it's just that I hadn't thought of it in those terms before.

Yes. What really brought it home to me was finding out that we have shortages of critically important medicine because the pharma companies just stopped making it. "Financially disincentivized" was the phrase. Old reliable drugs aren't nearly as profitable as newly patented ones, so why bother?

It's been rattling around my head recently that Discworld is almost anti-whimsy, and I mean that in a good way.

Whimsy, as I define it, is when something magical is put in just to wow the reader. A magic thing that doesn't really effect the story, but its fantastical. Pots cleaning themselves? Moving paintings? A fantastical creature used as set dressing? A spell that does something cool but we'll never hear about it again? What do they mean? Why are they there? Doesn't matter, we're moving on.

But Discworld always applies Logic to these things.

e.g. The old idea of all dwarfs having beards? Ha ha, even the women have beards. How silly.

But that means all dwarfs are men. But there are female dwarfs, right? Are they happy being men? What if you gave one the chance not to be a man? Oh, sure, they'd still have the beard, the helmet, the axe, those are cultural, but what if a dwarf wanted to be a woman? How would other dwarfs react? Would there be biting insults? Snide remarks? Jealousy from other female dwarfs trapped in their society? What if the Low King were a woman? What then?

Pratchett always had this tenacity to follow a whimsical idea until it was ground down in its own grim reality. It's like those old conversations about what would really happen if Superman caught you falling from a high building. You'd smash on his arms because you're still hitting something indestructible at terminal velocity. But the comics would never show that.

Pratchett shows that.

Introduces a werewolf? She has a constant identity crisis and feels like a dog sometimes, between human and wolf, and she's discriminated against in places for being undead. A conman running a bank? Forces everyone to realise how useless gold really is in a scathing indictment of economics. Death becomes Santa? But WHY DOES THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL NEED TO DIE? WHY THE UNFAIRNESS IN THE WORLD? WHY?

What can the harvest hope for, if not the care of the Reaper Man?

It's what sets these stories apart from so many others. Magic is never the solution, reality is usually the solution. And little is introduced without Pratchett delving the idea to its depths, sooner or later.

Guest Column: If Writers Lose the Standoff With Studios, It Hurts All Filmmakers

If the phrase “vocational awe” isn’t part of your lexicon yet, stop scrolling and read Fobazi Ettarh:

—Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves

I see it in every field I’ve ever worked in: publishing, open source software development, higher education. It describes pretty much every industry that relies on creativity, altruism, or both.

This website is elite. This website is the blueprint, it's the pinnacle. There is no website like it. I lwill never leave this website

This is why I dislike looking back on the past as if everything has been constantly improving to get us to where we are now

Our cement isn't as strong as the Romans, our steel isn't as strong as Damascus steel, we cannot replicate the beauty of a Stradivari violin, we've already lost some of the technology that flew Apollo and Gemini to space

And when I live out a suitcase I have to sift through a pile of stuff like a neanderthal

And you can put it in the bathroom so you don't get fuckiny bedbugs