“Don’t do any of this” - a bunch of things you totally should NOT do if adobe says what you’ve got is outdated and you should buy the newer worser version
hi. if you’re a young person or teenager who happens to be following me: write it down! keep a secret diary, a notepad, a blog your parents don’t have access to. write it down. keep a record somehow.
when i was a little kid and both my dad & i were being actively abused by my mom, he was familiar enough w her gaslighting that he instructed me at elementary school age to write down all the horrible things she did/said to me. it would be useful in court when custody was being argued and it would be useful to ME, years later, when my mom would try and convince me none of it happened. i had the proof, often word for word, that it did–and there was no hope in convincing my mom but a lot of hope in convincing myself and holding my stance against her. it was pivotal to advocating for myself and my feelings and eventually leaving her in my dust!
write it down!!! it’s so frustrating to have to deal with this bullshit, whether your parents are outright abusive or just fucking toxic/dysfunctional assholes. but you can do something for yourself and your mental health and that something is writing it down.
Protip for anyone engaging in discourse or just online arguments in general.
Turn off anon and replies.
Trust me, it may prevent some responses from getting through, but at the end of the day it is way better for your mental health. No anon hate, no one hiding in the replies to be jerks. I may have had some productive conversations with someone using the reply feature, but not seeing any more hate without arguments is well worth it.
It’s not cowardly to set boundaries like that. It is taking care of yourself.
i can’t stress this enough. i swear my anxiety has gotten worse from some of the experiences i had when i still had anons on and replies from anyone. i’ve been sent death threats and gore before. i don’t want others to go through that
Watching Eurovision and seeing Sheldon Riley, who is on the autism spectrum, absolutely made me sob. Not only because his pain is, unfortunately, so relatable to me and my experience as an autistic person, but also because it was so unbelievably inspiring to see an autistic person on stage. I rarely see people on the spectrum represented so there were some happy tears too. And I’m so thankful to him for spreading the message that autism isn’t something we have to ‘overcome’. The thing that is holding us back is mostly the limiting believes of others. And the symbolism of the unmasking he did at the end was absolutely beautiful. Also, he just sounds like an angel.
it was so nice to see and i really appreciate him using his voice to reach people about the struggles us autistic people face, especially in childhood
fucked up that neurodivergent has become the uwu vulnerable sweet baby word that 14 year olds use to avoid accountability because back when I started using neurodivergent as a self-identifier it was understood to be a radical statement of pride in having a different way of perceiving and interacting with the world, an affirmation that I wasn’t wrong or broken and that I could take up space in the world without having to change for others’ comfort and now the term that used to be a symbol of power and defiance for me has been smol-bean-ified to a degree that makes me feel actively defanged when I try to use it
i feel that too. especially now that tons of people online are treating it as a trend and claiming to be neurodivergent even though they’re not.
The sheer number of kids who are straight up putting their real names and ages and location in their bios like “Natasha | 14 | Minor | New York, NY!” and occasionally putting their actual school or city in their tags just terrifies me like no stop stop stop remove that right now I cannot emphasize how unsafe that is for you I am begging you for your sake remove thst shit right now
you know it’s time to go to bed when the existential crisis strolls in
if it’s the middle of the night and you suddenly hate yourself because you don’t read enough or your job sucks or you’re single or gender continues to happen or you gained weight or whatever is knocking on your… brain door? at ass o'clock at night, that is your brain saying it’s time to go the fuck to sleep, the crisis can come back during business hours
POV you’re a radical leftist freedom fighter that the narrative has chosen to turn into a terrorist so the protagonist can learn the horrors of radicalism and choose moderate reform instead
I think some people are misinterpreting the point of this in the comments. There are a lot of notes saying things along the lines of “but these people are murderers - they deserved to be villainized!” But that isthe point. These characters are a form of propaganda, and a very effective one. Let me explain.
If you take the core stance of each of these characters you get this (I’m leaving out Karli, because I haven’t seen TFATWS):
-Erik “Killmonger” Stevens: Wakanda had the ability to stop so much evil in the world (slavery, oppression), but chose to remain secretive and isolated instead, and I am opposed to this.
-Erik Lehnsherr (Magneto) and Raven Darkholme (Mystique): Mutants are being othered and oppressed and we need to stop this.
-Saw Gerrera: The Galactic Empire is evil and oppressive and needs to be stopped.
-Daenerys Targaryen: Slavery is wrong and should be stopped.
-Jet: The Fire Nation is evil and oppressive and needs to be stopped.
-Zaheer: Everyone deserves freedom and equal treatment.
Now, taken are their own, none of these positions are inherently evil. There all a lot of similarities among them, as well. All of these characters want to end oppression through radical change and bring about a more egalitarian society. Great.
Then we get to their methods. Killmonger was a violent war criminal, Magneto and Mystique are willing to kill anyone to achieve their goals, Saw was an extremist and is considered too violent for the Rebel Alliance, Daenerys is a monarchist tyrant and a mass murderer, Jet is willing to sacrifice an entire village to hurt his enemies, and Zaheer is also a violent murderer. These are all bad things.
So what is the issue? Where does the propaganda come in?
Well, these are all fictional characters. They were created in a very intentional way. They all have stances against oppression and a desire for radical change, but they all do this through brutal and violent destruction. This creates the association between the core stance and the violent methods. The intention of the propaganda is to make the audience think of the fight against oppressive systems as something that must be violent and cruel. If someone has ideas like Killmonger or Magneto or Saw, then they must also be a villain, because Killmonger and Magneto and Saw were all villainous.
And this does not only exist in the world of fiction. Read up on COINTELPRO to see how very similar tactics were used to discredit the Black Panther party and paint them as nothing more than violent extremists.
The point is that propaganda is very real and very insidious and we are all susceptible to it. But it is important to recognize why characters like this exist. There are many people in the real world who are working to dismantle oppressive systems and create change in their societies, and propaganda like this wants you to immediately write them off as violent extremists. But they’re not. Of course violent extremists exists in the real world, but not everyone fighting for change is a violent extremist. There are many many good people trying to end oppressive systems.
You do not need to like these characters or the things that they do, and you don’t need to hate the heroes they fight against. But at least think about why the character exists, why they are written that way, and what the writers want you to think.
Anyway this is your reminder to STOP BUYING SMART DEVICES THAT AREN’T NECESSARY.
Your soap does not need to connect to the internet. Your fridge does not need to be able to track the temperature in other countries. Your stove shouldn’t talk to you
This is not “technology bad” this is “these corporations are tracking you and your movements at ALL TIMES OF THE DAY.” They know your every move down to when you wash your hands after you take a shit. Alexa and Siri were the first introduction to this, and once people got used to them on their phones, they put them in their own little gadgets for your house.
And then they connected those gadgets to the lights. To the doors. To the window locks. To the thermostat.
You should be TERRIFIED at how many things are becoming “smart” these days. It’s yet another way for companies to sell to you, and, in a worst case scenario, it can be the thing that puts you in harms way.
Imagine you’re running a little late on your electric bill, and your fridge is a “smart” fridge. And because you’re running late on your payment they just….lock your fridge. Not shut the electricity off. Lock your fridge. Because fridges can now be locked remotely. You can no longer access your food until you pay them.
Cops want to know if you’ve been to any protests recently? They can track that handy dandy smart watch you decided to wear, even though you left your phone in the car. They can tell if you were home all day or lying.
Abusive partner or family member? They can shut off your support systems everywhere. Decide when you get to eat, if you do. Decide how hot or cold the house should be to make you suffer. Turn off the oven in the middle of you cooking dinner bc you upset them. Lock you in. Lock you out.
Your appliances, your LIFE, should not be surrounded by smart tech. Buy normal clocks. Get normal soap dispensers. Keep a pen and paper on the fridge to write down your grocery list. Set a manual timer for the oven. Wear a normal watch that only tells time. Get a step counter that clips to your belt.
Phone, laptop, TV. Those are the only things that make sense being “smart.” Everything else is one step closer to a dystopian novel that you don’t want to be in.
Your phone already tracks your every step. Don’t give every other thing in your life that ability.
And here’s the thing! It’s not only something that can cause you problems if you’re late to pay bills or have abusive partners/family or are doing something the government may not take kindly to!
Let’s say, hypothetically, you do literally nothing. Well, turns out there’s a bug in the fridge software that sets the temperature to 60 degrees when it receives some unexpected input from your fridge app. Or the manufacturer pushes out an involuntary fridge update and now, while the update is downloading, sorry! your the fridge doesn’t open until the update is done.
And these are only the issues that affect you. Generally, Smart Device manufacturers do not think for even one second about the security of their devices. So, this means that hackers will see well known and publicized security holes that have been easily available for literal years but the manufacturer is simply too lazy to fix, use those holes to get into devices, and use those devices as bots to attack whoever they please (and, as a bonus, it look like it’s coming from your home!)
You’d think that this sounds like something out of a horror movie but this is the reality we live in RIGHT NOW. Many of the largest botnets (e.g. the Mirai botnet) in the world consist largely of compromised smart/IoT (internet of things) devices.
So uh just give it some thought before you buy the SmartChair3000 – it’s probably not as cool as it sounds :P
Last week, Tyler Shields, one of my all time favorite artists and I finally had a photoshoot together that we’d been talking about for years. Literal years. We ended up shooting all different looks and we took some photos I’m really proud of.
We both posted them and the response has been pretty cool.
Seems like a lot of people were stoked to see a different body type (than usually represented in the media) embracing herself.
I want to get real with you. I have tried for my entire life to be skinny. To look like girls I see in magazines, on instagram, etc. I did my first juice cleanse at 13, was on Jenny Craig when I was 14, bulimic by 18. You name it, I’ve done it.
I got bullied my whole life, but pretty intensely in middle school for my weight: fake youtube accounts were created to comment on my videos, boys writing on my facebook photos, honesty box (god, remember honesty box?!?!) prank phone calls - i mean… it got bad. So bad my parents made me switch schools.
Eventually, I got to a point where losing the 10, 15, 20 lbs wasn’t worth it. Thinking about my food intake, my waistline, most importantly, what other people were thinking about my waistline, was consuming me in every single aspect of my life and I was miserable. For all of high school I didn’t show my arms to anyone because one time in middle school someone told me I had man shoulders and fat arms. I lost weight, I gained weight and my happiness didn’t change! There was NO correlation. At all! Like at ALL! I could be skinny, hungry and still miserable. Or I could be less skinny, still hungry, still miserable! And I was so sure that being skinny would make me happy/make people love me/make all of my wildest hopes and dreams come true. Eventually I realized that idea was WRONG.
It hit me recently that I, and I alone, am responsible for my own happiness. I get to decide whether or not to wake up and look at my body like it’s something awesome, or terrible, or fine, or disgusting (or as my favorite 7th grade troll says “disgutsing”). People will say shitty things. They will. Because someone said shitty things to them. Because they are unhappy with themselves. Because they’re mean. Because WHO CARES. They will say shitty things and usually it has nothing to do with you. So I’m trying really hard to wake up and choose to see my body as exactly what it is - mine, and the only one I’ll ever have. It lets me walk, and dance and sing and move and run and go to soulcycle and pilates and also lay on the couch and watch SVU for hours. I get to decide to love it or hate it. And that decision changes, sometimes every 14 seconds. I don’t wake up feeling confident everyday. I don’t. Not even close.
I got the feeling after reading some comments and messages (lovely ones!) that some of you might be feeling the same things that I feel and I wanted you to know, you’re awesome. You’re not perfect. No one is. You’re you! And you’re better at being you than anyone else in the world. So figure out what you love about being you and embrace that. And the things you don’t love so much, embrace them too. Because life is so much better when you do. I spent years believing other peoples thoughts about my body, thoughts that they probably didn’t think twice about shooting into my brain like evil little arrows. Thoughts that have lived in my brain for 15 years, thoughts that built a home and had kids and rescued a dog.
But, I’m trying something new. I’m trying to start believing my own thoughts about my body. Which is that I am so lucky and thankful that it works so well (especially after lots of years of me treating it like total shit)
So today I’m starting small, I’m waking up and choosing to just be stoked that I can pick up my guitar and write a song. My body lets me do that, and in my opinion, that’s pretty awesome! So good morning, your body lets you be you - don’t let anyone take that away from you. You’re awesome. Now, go out there and be your bad self.
One of the most startlingly effective things I’ve seen in the psychology literature is the power of “self-affirmation.”
The name is a bit misleading. The “self-affirmation” described in these studies isn’t looking in the mirror and telling yourself you’re beautiful. It’s actually values affirmation — writing short essays about what’s important to you in life (things like “family”, “religion”, “art”) and why you value them. The standard control intervention is writing about why a value that’s not very important to you might be important to someone else.
Values affirmation has been found in many studies to significantly improve academic performance in “negatively stereotyped” groups (blacks, Hispanics, and women in STEM), and these effects are long-lasting, continuing up to a year after the last exercise.[1] Values affirmation causes about a 40% reduction in the black-white GPA gap, concentrated in the middle- and low-performing students.[4]
This was startling and fascinating to me for a couple reasons. Firstly, if that’s true, that would be huge. We’ve thrown billions at the achievement gap mostly without results.
Secondly, I’d heard ‘self-affirmation’ thrown around before, and I assumed it was sort of like generic ‘positivity’ messages - you know, “love yourself!!’ and ‘you deserve the world!’ and I find all that stuff vaguely icky. (”love yourself” is super underspecified. What does that even mean? Is it an emotion? A belief? Do I have to be able to experience it persistently? On demand?)
Butvalues affirmation - well, values affirmation makes a hell of a lot of sense to me. Sarah continues (bolding mine):
There is a kind of personal quality that has to do with believing you are fit to make value judgments. Believing that you are free to decide your own priorities in life; believing that you are generally competent to pursue your goals; believing that you are allowed to create a model of the world based on your own experiences and thoughts.
If you lack this quality, you will look to others to judge how worthy you are, and look to others to interpret the world for you, and you will generally be more anxious and more likely to unconsciously self-sabotage.
I think of this quality as being a free personorbeing sovereign. The psychological literature will often characterize it as “self-esteem”, but in popular language “self-esteem” is overloaded with “thinking you’re awesome”, which is different. Everybody has strengths and weaknesses and nobody is wonderful in every way. Being sovereign doesn’t require you to think you’re perfect; it is the specific feeling that you are allowed to use your own mind.
I’ve noticed people who have this thing. I’ve aspired to be a person who has this thing, and aspired to write in a way that carves out space for other people to find this thing. I didn’t have a word for it.
I think it’s the way that a lot of social justice goes wrong. I’ve seen a lot of activism that doesn’t feel like it’s coming from a place of “I want to empower others to decide their own priorities; I want the people around me to feel competent and supported in achieving their goals; I want to build a movement that lets us take our own experiences seriously in building a model of the world.” I’ve read stuff that feels like it’s saying ‘yeah we already got the answer to that step; now do what you’re told’.
And the research suggests that people can’t live like that, and shouldn’t.
i do care if someone hires someone to clean though like you can’t just throw that out there as if it isn’t well known that those people that are hired to clean your home exist because they’re poor. wash your own dirty dishes
I understand what you’re saying, but you also seem to be ignoring the fact that people who are hiring these poor people to clean their houses are giving those people jobs. If they weren’t hiring them to clean their houses, these people may not have a job at all.
i don’t agree with this logic. i don’t think we need to settle for a job or nothing, is the same to be said for women who work under slavery like conditions in clothing factories in poor countries? why can’t we fight for change instead of accepting that some people just have to be maids
Before she moved in to take care of her, my aunt hired a maid to come to my disabled grandmother’s house once a week to clean for like 2-3 hours and paid her $80 every time she came over. There’s no way my grandmother, who had a bum hip from a car accident and hobbled around with her walker (back when she could even walk), could clean her own house. Maids provide an invaluable service, especially for the elderly and disabled, and they shouldn’t be eliminated just because you think their jobs are somehow not good enough for anyone to be doing. Many jobs like housecleaners, gardeners, etc., are great for people who may not speak the local language, who may have had a limited education, or who came here as adults with limited opportunities. My grandfather, who could speak four languages fluently but his English sucked, became a janitor at the age of 58 to support his family when they first came to America, and his kids always advocated that you should treat blue-collar and traditionally low-paid workers with respect because those jobs are valuable and even someone who cleans toilets is a person who is trying their best. Basically, we shouldn’t try to eliminate these jobs; they should just be better compensated.
yes i agree! i think that disabled people should have help and that it should be easily available for them but to me that wasn’t what the post was talking about!! i read it as a wealthy people simply hiring help to clean just because they can not because they need to. in an altruistic society people who love to clean could become a maid without having to depend on it, if everyone’s basic needs where met and no one would be walking hungry without their job that’s a different story to me! so while yes we do need to bring respect and wages to these jobs i also don’t think it’s unfair to think about if people actually need their houses cleaned by someone else! some do, including the disabled, some don’t!
But here’s the thing.
By focusing our attention and wrath on people who might buy things they don’t really “need” (OH the wailing over AOC’s $300 purse) we lose sight of the actual problem (Uber and Lyft spending $200 million dollars to defeat legislation that would require them to treat their workers as employees).
Rich people hiring cleaners because they’re “lazy” is not the problem. It is a symptom of the problem. If all rich people started picking up their socks and doing their own dishes tomorrow, it wouldn’t increase the wellbeing or economic security of the rest of us one iota. No small cosmetic change will do that. Only fundamentally changing the legal and economic landscape will do that.
And in the meantime, people’s goalposts for who is “rich” and who is “lazy” will always be so flexible that it will inevitably hit a lot more poor people with disposable income than actual 1%ers.
I know as a disabled person that we are constantly put under scrutiny to prove we’re “disabled enough” to afford accommodation so you absolutely CANNOT say “this is the rule but of COURSE disabled people are excepted uwu.” If the rule isn’t built to accommodate disabled people in the first place, it WILL be used to treat us like shit unless we can meet whatever level of “disabled enough” a random unqualified stranger has decided is today’s benchmark, and meeting that will mean a constant surrender of our rights to privacy and dignity.
This is all probably useless when talking to someone named “70s lesbian” but I really truly promise you, policing people’s choices and “rescuing” people from immoral or “demeaning” work is not nearly as useful as focusing on improving societal and material conditions for workers and poor people.
As a disabled person, I don’t want to rely on someone being “altruistic” to do necessary housework I’m too fatigued and in too much pain to do - and on people deciding I was “disabled enough” through some arbitrary standard to require help. I get enough of “you’re just lazy and your pain is made up” already, thanks.
I’d love to be in a position able to pay someone a fair wage to help deal with housework that I can’t do without hurting myself.
In the same way, I don’t drive. If I need to go somewhere, I really like when I’m able to pay someone for this service! I don’t like having to wait for a friend or acquaintance to be available, and coordinate their schedule with mine, and take time out of their day, and possibly resent me for it (especially if I need to go several places), and have the option of withholding this help in the future if they decide to be an asshole. (I’ve been in abusive situations before where my basic needs have been used as leverage against me. e.g. “Well, you set boundaries I don’t like, so I’m not going to take you to your doctor’s appointment”.)
If I can just say “Here, have money in exchange for doing this thing I can’t/don’t want to do”, things are a lot simpler.
Relying on other people to help out of the goodness of their hearts isn’t practical or realistic for longterm, day-to-day survival stuff. (If it was, disabled people wouldn’t be in the shitty situations we’re so often in, and so many of us wouldn’t live in poverty.) It’s a nice IDEA, but it doesn’t tend to happen on a large scale.
Cleaning is unpleasant! I’m sure there exist people who enjoy some aspects of it, but if I had to wait for someone to clean out the cat box because they want to, it would never get done. Because cleaning up another animal’s bodily functions is gross and stinky, and if it’s not your cat you really should be compensated in some way for this.
I want everyone to have UBI, too, so that they’re not in a position where they HAVE TO do it or starve, but that’s a separate issue.
Hi, I’m employed part-time by a cleaning service, and I also work full-time as a janitor, and I gotta say, I’m not loving some of the takes in this thread.
1. First of all, there is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with employing a service to make your life easier, whether you need it or not. I feel like we should start with that. A person who hires the services of a maid or cleaning company is well within their right to do so, whether it’s because they can’t do it themselves or it’s because they just don’t want to. That’s their choice! They are paying money for a service! Except in cases where they are hiring someone directly, they do not control how much the employees who clean their homes/offices/businesses get paid!
2. That said, maid/cleaning services may get tipped, but they are still beholden to minimum wage laws. If you want to talk about paying us more, THAT’S how you’re going to do it, not by policing who is and is not “allowed” to hire these services. That said, it might be a good idea to actually do some research into how much a maid or cleaner actually gets paid. I think it’s going to surprise quite a lot of you. Obviously not every person who cleans is going to make a fair wage, but like. Quite a lot of us do, actually. For example, at my part time job, I make $17.50/hour. At my full time job, I’m salaried at $34k/year, with full benefits–and I mean full, including full health, eye, and dental coverage, retirement plan, accruing PTO, the WORKS–and a yearly raise, because,
3. Anyone who cleans in state- or federal-owned buildings are state or federal employees. I’m not sure if the same can be said for municipalities, but I know at the very least, public school janitors are… I’m fairly certain ALL employees of the city in which they work, if not the state. I work as a janitor at a state college, which makes me an employee of the state, which entitles me to the benefits and union protections of literally any other employee of my state. So, like, to make my next point,
4. Please get it out of your head that we need to be pitied for our “demeaning” work. First of all, that is incredibly condescending. Second of all, our work is extremely important! We perform necessary services to society across the board! Please stop looking down your nose at people who clean for a living!! Third of all, I obviously can’t speak for every person who cleans for a living, but from my own personal experience, I have been treated with significantly more respect by my clients at every cleaning job I’ve ever worked than I ever had working retail or food service. Obviously you’re going to get an occasional client having a bad day or who is generally unkind, but even then, they’re almost always appreciative of the work we do. I do not feel demeaned for my work. The only time I have ever felt ashamed of my work is when people TREATED my work like it’s something to be ashamed of.
5. Maybe some people “just have to be a maid,” but like. A lot of us enjoy our work? We take pride in it?? We get a sense of satisfaction seeing something that was dirty and gross NOT BE dirty and gross anymore??? Like, yeah, if I had the choice I’d prefer not to clean strangers’ houses or a bunch of classrooms, but that has nothing to do with the work itself, and everything to do with the fact that I’d just? Like not to work?? But even if UBI were instated tomorrow, I’d still want something to do with my time, and if I, with my level of experience and education, had to choose between the types of jobs available to me, I’d still pick what I’m doing, just because I enjoy it more! I don’t have to deal with vast hoardes of the general public! In fact, most of the time I’m alone! I work at my pace! Nobody’s standing behind me, rushing me or telling me to smile or docking my hours because I’m not up to some arbitrary standard. I LIKE MY WORK!
I know my experiences are not universal. I know there are plenty of cleaning companies that aren’t going to treat their workers with respect, and I know there are even more clients out there who are going to look down on us for the work we do. I know full well that we deserve better wages and better benefits and better treatment for the important work we do (and the fact that none of us qualify for the covid vaccine despite consistent exposure to everything from hospitals to public schools to private offices to private homes is definitely one thing that boils my blood when I think about it too hard).
But, again, this is not demeaning work. This is not shameful work. And there is no line to say whether or not the work I do is justified. I am being paid to perform a service. Whether that service is in the home of someone who can’t clean up after themselves or someone who just wants their time at home not to be interrupted by chores isn’t my business, and it certainly isn’t the business of someone who’d see me out of a job just because they don’t like that fact.
I hire a house cleaning service once a month, simply because cleaning is a skill I do not have. And yes, it is a skill–I can pick up my dirty clothes and empty the dishwasher and all the other basic adulting things, but really getting into corners and sweeping and scrubbing and all the other minutae? If it were up to me it would happen maybe three times a year. So I pay someone else to do it–not because I’m above doing it myself but because they’re much better at it.
Glad to finally have a version of this post with someone who actually does this kind of work chiming in. Cleaning is absolutely skilled labor. It would take me two days to accomplish what a professional does in three hours and they’d still do it better than me.
Leftists who think the solution is to eliminate certain professions they’ve been taught to look down are literally buying into capitalist propaganda. “Play the game or you might have to become one of *those* people.” Instead we should treating all workers and all types of labor with dignity and respect and make sure everyone earns not just a living but a thriving wage.
I have someone clean every other week. She helps me clean and she cleans (she can give me a task and I can do it but I get overwhelmed if I clean on my own). Thank you to all the cleaning people, food delivery people, and mail and FedEx drivers who make my life so much easier.
