Achilles dragging Hector’s corpse around Troy

#oh this is a Baby sound #this is a sound mother cats make when they’re calling to their kittens #it’s not an alarm call #it’s more like ‘hey kids it’s time to travel follow me’ sort of call

Exactly what @followthebluebell wrote! This cat is trying to carry their ‘kitten’ to a new nest. I’ve never seen this behaviour before with a human and it’s hilarious to watch in action.

omg this made me realize that my wife's late cat (rest in your complete disdain for every other human, Mr. Kitty) wasn't yelling for attention, he genuinely thought my wife had gotten lost in the apartment

When the health food store unionized, something wild happened that I thought was just a goofy one-off, but makes more sense now.

There was a big push to eliminate "degrading jobs" but the strategy was to eliminate the position, then create a new position outside of the bargaining unit to do the work. So like, we wouldn't have dishwashers, but we'd have people who washed dishes that weren't eligible to be in the union.

I was like A) what the actual fuck? Dish washing isn't "degrading", it's fucking vital. B) What the actual fuck? You want to create a union just to exploit different people?

There were enough of us to be like "Absolutely the fuck not," and put a stop to it, but I was absolutely flummoxed that people involved in a union would say that out loud. Working with more leftists now, it makes sense.

I think it was coming from a background that viewed labor as necessary to accomplish anything, but advocated for the equitable distribution of the gains made by labor... and then being thrown in with people who just thought labor was icky.

The first time someone told me that busing tables was "degrading", I was like "Oh, uhh, yeah, like it's very necessary work but under compensated for how vital it is?" and they responded "No, touching plates that other people have eaten off of is disgusting."

But I want to eat off of clean plates. So somebody is going to have to touch/clean those plates. And I respect that person and want them to be able to afford to live.

Those people sound like a guy I'd make up to be mad at.

I mean, that job definitely had a Truman Show vibe. If they hadn't been in-person interactions, I'd think I was getting trolled.

Just to put a bow on it:

In bargaining, someone on the Union side suggested that we eliminate all the cashiers and exclusively use self-checkouts (they were a cashier and didn't like it). The organizer told them that the union wasn't in the habit of eliminating bargaining unit positions. (This is the same person I've talked about how said that "as a prison abolitionist" we just needed to execute most criminals.)

When I explained holiday scheduling (time off requests granted in order of seniority, shifts assigned in reverse order of seniority). Someone was angry and said that time off requests potentially being denied "wasn't in the spirit of the union". When I pointed out that our departments made like 30% of our annual revenue between Thanksgiving and New Years and that required production staff to be working, they said that we just needed to create a class of positions ineligible for the bargaining unit that wouldn't be able to request time off. (Which again, most of us figured we'd just rotate holidays or something, but assumed that some holiday production was mandatory.)

I was on leftie tiktok (as a creator) for a bit and I saw this attitude there as well. I specifically remember one argument around cleaners where someone said that employing a cleaner was, like, ethically bad, and that "after the revolution" we wouldn't have cleaners.

It got me thinking, along with Ann Russell talking about how to treat cleaners (being a cleaner herself), about how we conceptualise domestic service as particularly degrading in all its forms, when, really, why is that? Why is paying someone to do something intrinsically bad?

Like, even in a moneyless, gift economy society, there would still be people whose primary contribution to their communities would be cleaning. Some people like to clean, and are really rather good at it.

I've talked ad nauseam in the past about how British attitudes towards cleaners and other service based positions today are the descendants of Victorian attitudes. That is, both the attitudes of conservatives and many progressives of that time. The trade union movement was particularly exclusionary towards service workers.

I think people on the left thinking about forms of labour can sometimes be worse than people on the right. People who have taken these positions generally just conceptualise them as something you need to do to get by, and there are particular employers where these positions are degrading but in general the jobs themselves aren't.

Yeah, that really sums it up. There's stuff that needs to get done, so I'll never be of the opinion that it's degrading work. I worked in kitchens for a long time, and every other position is reliant on having clean dishes, so nobody can really be "above" washing dishes. The shitty thing about washing dishes or busing tables is how people treat the people doing it. The work itself is vital.

And some of those jobs are like, sure, you can throw almost any warm body at it and get it done adequately, but you still run into people where you're like "Holy shit, you're good at this."

People doing a job most people don't want to do should be paid MORE in order to get people to do it. That's how it would work if we weren't mired in a schema assuming that less-frequently-desired jobs are the province of people who "can't do better" and "deserve" poverty because they have less value as people.

I worked in domestic service for a few years (ie. I was a servant) and I learned a lot, but one of the things I learned was:

The job is exactly as degrading as my employer thinks it is.

I worked for a couple of families who had always had servants, it was normal to them; they were great employers, treated me like a human being. I liked working for them, I’m still in touch with the kids of one of them.

I worked for a family who were uncomfortable with the concept. They wanted someone who cooks and cleaned and cared for their children so they didn’t have to, but they were uncomfortable with the idea of ‘having a servant’. They weren’t rude or unkind, but I hated it there. They viewed the job they were paying me for as innately degrading, and that made it so.

Dignity is not innate to some work and not others; dignity is innate to humanity, and if the job needs doing, the person who does it has dignity.

for like a decade I kept getting the advice of "don't ruminate" but also "sit with your emotions" and I was like What The Fuck Does That Even Mean. until someone finally explained it in a way that makes sense:

so there's the emotional part of your brain ("I'm embarrased") and then there's the storytelling part ("all my friends hate me and I'm a piece of shit"). when people say "don't ruminate" what they mean is don't feed the storytelling part

you tend to the emotion ("I'm feeling x. why am I feeling that? how do I move forward given that information? what's something nice I can do for myself right now to cope with this?") but you treat the storytelling part like a little goblin that's trying to be as unhelpful to this whole process as possible. this doesn't shut the storytelling goblin up completely, but it keeps it from causing so much chaos and over time it stops talking so damn much

it's basically like if you were trying to comfort a friend. you'd validate their emotions, but you wouldn't sit there and let them call themself a piece of shit. do that for yourself

sharing this in case someone else is also like Why Didn't Someone Just Say That

nothing funnier to me than when AI does math wrong. like I get why it happens, it's a language model that's treating the numbers you feed it as words rather than integers and then giving you an answer based on how those words typically appear in a block of text instead of actually performing a calculation. but the one thing computers are genuinely incredible at. you fucked up a perfectly good calculator is what you did, look at it it's got hallucinations

The flip side of “cleanse diets don’t do anything” is that if you tried a cleanse diet and you did experience a notable reduction in fatigue, joint pain, and general blarginess, you need to talk to an allergy specialist, because there’s nearly a 100% chance that means you have an undiagnosed allergy to some component of your customary diet.

This is an excellent point and I’d imagine there’s a lot of quack diets that continue circulating and getting press based on this exact principle.

Absolutely – a great many diets of the “stop eating everything except these three foods” variety are 100% trading on the fact that they’re practically guaranteed to generate some positive testimonials by virtue of coincidentally cutting somebody’s undiagnosed food allergy out of their diet.

I think it's usually plain allergy but shoutout to the poor saps who found out that ketosis controls their symptoms

i so deeply understand the reasoning of every comment

getting a concussion and getting pregnant both work but i dont' recommend them

i guess i'm not as despairing as many people about the future of the planet simply because the fact that we're not in way worse shape today suggests the earth is crazy resilient

Reading anything about environmental history is like "and by 1956 the river was so full of uranium and bubonic plague that the only living organism found in it was an single amoeba which died immediately after being documented" and I'm like okay maybe today's problems aren't necessarily uniquely disastrous and unsolvable

This is only one example but apparently malaria was introduced to the USA by the slave trade but there was a program in the 50's to wipe it out and we did. by dusting thousands of tons of Paris green (an arsenic compound) as well as a shit ton of DDT all over our wetlands

@notpockets Where are you getting "accept mass death of humans" from this?!

I am very firmly arguing against the "we should not bother planning for the future because we're all going to die and so we should all sit on the internet and wait for the Glorious Day When Someone Murders All The Billionaires Which Magically Fixes All Problems" school of thought which I would argue is significantly more anti-human than anything else

@casspea I'm pulling this out of replies because I want to give a serious response to it, because this is very important to me. I will start by asking a question that will initially appear unrelated.

Do you know why it is so hard to leave an abusive relationship?

I didn't. I understood, like most people do, that people don't get into abusive relationships because they are stupid or made clearly avoidable stupid decisions, but I didn't *understand*—meaning that I couldn't really imagine myself getting into that situation. I had a strong sense of my own worth and I knew all the signs of an abusive relationship, so I just...innocently figured I would see that sort of thing coming.

[Narrator: She did not see it coming.]

What I didn't know was WHY smart people end up in abusive relationships—really, I was mistaken about the whole nature of wisdom and intelligence and knowledge. I saw those things as stable characteristics of myself or any person, facts, failing to realize that everything, everything, everything takes up energy.

Even knowing takes up energy.

Your body and mind evolved to account for this fact. Your body and mind evolved to allocate your energy based on your needs—in order to keep you alive. Have you ever had a panic attack? I have. That's your body pouring all your energy into preparing for whatever action is necessary to face the threat.

Certain things are necessary for a human to feel safe—to be safe. Steady access to food. Shelter. Privacy. Bodily integrity. Stability. Support from other humans. In terms of energy, it is incredibly costly to not be safe.

Hold onto that, because it's important. It is incredibly costly to not be safe.

You said in an earlier reply that my post sounded like I had never lived in an impoverished region. I find that offensive, and here's why: It is incredibly costly to not be safe. If you are just one accident, one mistake, one sickness, one stroke of bad luck away from losing your house, your health, your stability, your family's supper tomorrow, you are not safe and your body knows. And this is why poverty kills you. Slowly. Every day of your life.

So this is how a smart person gets into an abusive relationship: You live with this person, and it's okay right now. If things can just stay okay for a while...you can make it. You just need things to keep being okay, because you are not safe you're tired, and you need a little time to recharge after the last time you had to talk and set a boundary with them, because you are not safe that conversation was stressful and took a lot of energy.

You set a boundary. And it takes a lot of energy to explain to them what they did to hurt you and why, but you think they get it, finally.

And then they push that boundary. And you have the conversation again. And things are okay.

And then they push.

And the less privacy, the less security, the less you have—the more they encroach upon your basic needs—the costlier it becomes to set and enforce boundaries, because you have less and less energy left to change or interrogate your situation.

And they start raising the cost. Pricing you out of the boundaries you have already set. You can't afford to defend those boundaries anymore, so you back off, ceding more and more of your safety to them. And not being safe is incredibly costly.

You were a smart person. Now you're too tired to think. You don't have the energy to do anything, anything, anything except survive, and you can't even see your situation for what it is, because you are expending all your energy trying to stop it from getting worse.

Now, I guess the idea of people being terrified all the time about climate change and thinking about dying and other people dying and losing everything they value and love and not having a future for themselves or their children (if they were so bold as to have them) is really, fucking, gratifying in the sense that it means they feel the gravity and seriousness of the situation the appropriate amount. I guess. Awesome!

But terrified people are not very good at solving problems because being shitting-your-pants terrified all the time makes you stupid (for reasons that are not your fault)

And terrified people are incredibly resistant to change because adjusting to change takes energy and they don't HAVE energy because literally all their energy is going toward the fucking monumental task of staying fucking alive

And people that have KNOWN their whole goddamn lives, in the marrow of their bones, that they don't have a future, cannot imagine the future.

We have to imagine the future.

We have to.

Have you ever had a panic attack? Like a bad panic attack? Have you ever fully, truly, deeply believed you were going to die? I have. I was 10. Panic attacks are supposed to last 20-30 minutes max but I guess my body wants to live more than most because I have 2-3 hours of it in me. And yet there is a point at which you lie down and wait for it to kill you, because you can't hang on anymore. Because you can't DO anything.

And you can learn to be resilient! I sure fucking did! I learned to shove on through that shit like a zombie, indestructible, completely unable to locate or name my own discomfort screaming through my body like an air raid siren! I pushed through! Except I wasn't moving 'through' anything! I was just Dying Physically!

This is to say that the gut-wrenching certainty of facing a future ruled by unspeakable horrors is quite familiar to me thankyouverymuch, and it wasn't exactly fertile ground for developing a "solutions" mindset.

The idea that not being in despair about the earth means you must not love it? Well, that just about boils my blood.

Because I did love the Earth when I was a little kid, but all throughout my whole teenage years I never thought of doing any kind of volunteer work or getting involved in my local community or even LEARNING about it that much. Why?

Because I thought we were all fucked anyway, so why bother. Because I was already dealing with my own shit and I couldn't bear taking that grief upon my own shoulders. I HATED my hometown, hated it, never had the tiniest bit of love for it in my heart, and honestly in my mind it was worthless, because the old growth had been cut down and the wolves and bison were gone and housing developments were built, and I was convinced i would live to see it get worse, and worse, and worse, see more woods get destroyed and my beloved creek be bulldozed and polluted, and I couldn't just go out and pour my heart into something I knew was doomed to be fucking obliterated anyway. I was trying to fucking survive.

And that's what I saw everyone else doing. Mourning. Bemoaning how we were going to watch tigers go extinct and the forests burn. Nervously joking about the unlikely possibility that we would make it to 50.

I fucking grew up in the Bible Belt, surrounded by people who thought the Earth was nothing more than a piece of tissue to be crumpled up and thrown away! My parents grew up having nightmares about nuclear bombs raining down on their hometown and so did I! The only stories about the future I can think of have zombies, fascism and/or child death tournaments! We are not exactly encouraged to give ourselves gentle things in our dreams of what tomorrow may bring.

So i was a creative writing major for a while and as a result read a lot of literary poetry, and if you don't know what literary poetry is, it's poems by someone who has a MFA or PhD in poetry and are published in very fancy self-important journals.

Anyway once upon a time I read this poem

And I wasn't exactly shining rays of sunshine out the crack of my ass in those days but this shitty poem snapped me out of my pessimism. Oh God, I thought, I may write edgy and depressing shit sometimes but I'll never put a cold wet snot rag like this into the world.

Ants? Ants are going to go extinct? Fucking ants? I want to punt this writer out of the solar system for the hubris of that alone.

It's so...self centered, this mindset the poem shows. So self-pitying. Poor little me! Humans are the virus and I'm so sad that we're such a disease upon the earth! Boohoo!

And it seriously got me thinking: Do these projections and predictions actually motivate anyone to take action? Do they do anything except satisfy some self-indulgent urge to wallow in depression and misanthropy?

This poem doesn't emerge from love; that's what struck me at the time. The author doesn't love the Earth if she lacks the basic curiosity to learn what algae even is (photosynthetic! Not found in caves!) nor to learn of the wonders of the world of ants (definitely not going to go extinct). Her projected future is bizarre—why would humans live in caves? Why are cockroaches the only animal expected to survive? Is she confusing climate change with a nuclear war?

But it's the air of admonishment that gets me. The bold insinuation that people are "doing nothing" while the Earth dies non-specifically.

Lady, trees fucking died for the paper this sludge was printed upon.

People think instilling dread is doing something. It's not. People think cultivating despair is doing something. It's not. People think that fear, fear of a thousand horrible futures shown to us by every imagination on every screen and page, will be a goad to jab people toward some unclear but presumed-accessible "action," but this ongoing fear and grief and despair over our world DOES NOTHING except deplete what meager reserves of energy people have left after being alive in the world these days.

My generation is constantly desperate for numbness, rest, and escapism because living gets more and more untenable all the time. Have you noticed Fascism? What about the economy? Have you seen the people around you just constantly shutting themselves down to avoid thinking about a future that feels hopeless?

What is the expectation? That people feel terrified forever? Terror isn't fuel, it's the act of burning up all your fuel at once. After your energy runs out, something arrives to replace terror. For most people today, that something is apathy and despair, because it's easiest.

We need solutions to the climate crisis. We need community building. We need ideas, we need WORK, steady unsexy boring slow work, we need commitment to the work and to our communities, commitment that is only driven by love and genuine investment, and fear will not create these things.

Without hope, we have NOTHING.

I have hope because I believe there is hope, and I have hope because I fucking have to. I came to the place where I could no longer sustain being terrified, and I had to choose.

I can't exist in a world this scary, I thought. I can't do it. It's impossible. To accept this world as it is exceeds the tensile strength of the human soul.

And the answer was, Then don't exist, but I didn't like that answer, so the answer was, Then you must change it.

Once upon a time I could not imagine the future. All I saw was death. Fire. Extinction. I saw no hope for me or my planet. I only wished to experience some happiness before it all collapsed.

And then I rescued a tree.

Well. A lot of trees. It took me a while to learn to care for them. But I rescued a tiny sycamore tree from the edge of a parking lot and I took care of that tree and it grew and flourished under my care, and I marveled at my own power to make a difference to this one tiny tree...

...and I thought, this tree will grow taller than me. This tree will be big enough for birds to nest in its branches someday. Someday...

and I looked ahead, at that horizon many years in the future that had always been filled with nothing but ash and dust, and I saw something new.

I saw a tree.

I returned to Nature—to my Nature, the pavement and gravel and scrubby woods—and, just, holy fuck, I started to see. I observed the weeds—the dandelions, the amaranth, the tough little bastards that grow in pavement and concrete, and something clicked. They adapt. They survive. They are tough as nails, growing in places nothing else can grow in spite of all our attempts to eradicate them. And they help everything else survive and grow. They are healers.

I thought, can we learn from them? Can we ally with them?

Nature is our ally. Not as a princess in a tower waiting to be saved. Nature adapts, moves, changes. Nature is constantly, relentlessly fighting back.

I think Nature has a lot to teach us about adaptation, about collaborating and helping one another. About survival. I learned much more—I learned to see the symbiosis that connects all things, and saw how we fit into that symbiosis, when we are willing to participate in it.

This is what the dandelions showed me: When you heal, when you thrive, when you are happy and flourishing, you make the world more habitable for others. Dandelions pry open compacted soil with their taproots, provide pollen and nectar for survival of insects, keep the ground moist and encourage organic matter to collect. Dandelions are food and medicine, and they can sprout and grow at any temperature. This is how an ecosystem works: when one hardy weed takes hold and thrives, the others, more delicate, can then begin to arrive.

You are not separate from every other thing. You are part of humankind, part of a social community, part of your family and friends. This means that hope is powerful.

The more joy and love you cultivate in your relationship with the planet, the more she will replenish you, restore your hope. The more you share this joy, the more powerful the force for change becomes.

I have seen this in my own life, when I have healed and improved my own life, I have been able to give back so much more to the world than ever before. I try to enact this—as people flee my impoverished, deep red state for their safety, as Fascism tightens its grip, I dig my roots in deeper. I am relief in this wasteland. I will stand my ground. I will be visible, opinionated, uncompromising, because the more vulnerable cannot be.

Despair is poison. It will kill us dead. It will kill our planet. We need hope. And there is hope, both in us and the ecosystems around us.

I believe we, humans, hold the potential to be a weed species. Not only surviving, but facilitating, creating a path for the healing of Earth. We are caretakers. This role has been well recognized by indigenous peoples for thousands of years.

In this wasteland, the beautiful flowers struggle to grow and the little trees do not dare reach for the sky. So I'm a fucking dandelion. Kudzu kicking ass on a lifeless abandoned copper mine. I'm Amaranth utterly refusing to die. I'm a sycamore tree patiently inching roots under asphalt. I'm a scrappy cedar grabbing hold amid the rocks. I'm crabgrass and spotted spurge and all the weeds that make the guys on r/lawncare weep and wail.

I got sprayed with despair and survived, and now I'm resistant. My seeds and pollen are everywhere now. Hehehehehehe.

My favorite fucking website

My low IQ idiot friend: im growing an apple tree in my backyard. Fuji - my absolute favorite. You sho...

Me, genius, visibly thinking extremely hard, not paying attention to a word he's saying: *apple tree ... apple ... worm ... worm HOLE ... apple car ... apple shaped car ... worm driving apple car*

Me, now having decided on how to respond: I wish id never met you. I wisb youd never been born

A farmer 10,000 years ago in the Tian Shan mountains: "Apple. Small, hard, bitter, wild, but I BET if I work on it I can make it big and delicious. What's that? No one's done arboriculture before? Hold my digging stick, I have a plan that'll knock your socks off."

Some guy on twitter: Apples remind me of Star Trek :) :) :)

Hey, should we check in on that Target boycott? See how it is going?

Reminder that this is still going on (through April 17th) and that we, the consumers, have a lot of power

~ The Nervous Housewife, Abraham Myerson, M.D., 1920

i hope every single one of you outlives these hateful fucks on the news right now. i hope each and every one of you is able to find joy and support throughout these tumultuous times and i hope you get to live so fiercely as yourself. i hope you wake up one day to news that you’ve outlived those pieces of absolute shit and whether that brings you joy or relief or hope or what have you, i hope you live to see that day

Not an invitation to cocoon yourself in a self-care bubble for four years, but a reminder to the 24/7 worriers that you can literally write "To Do on Monday: Worry about ________" on a post-it note and stop worrying about it for one day while you recharge.

Another point: Both your mental health and your ability to resist will be improved by finding a community. A sorrow shared is a sorrow halved. And apes together strong.

i hope every single one of you outlives these hateful fucks on the news right now. i hope each and every one of you is able to find joy and support throughout these tumultuous times and i hope you get to live so fiercely as yourself. i hope you wake up one day to news that you’ve outlived those pieces of absolute shit and whether that brings you joy or relief or hope or what have you, i hope you live to see that day

We're at the stage where the blitzkrieg of EOs is dying down and getting blocked daily in the courts and the Republicans in Congress realize that it'll be on them to implement whatever Elon wants them to do.

Anyone who has gotten tired of contacting their Reps/Senators, you're only just getting started. We're heading toward Government Shutdown March. It's on the Republicans to prevent that and there's a 98% chance they can't do it without Democratic votes to bail them out.

Time to put all the attention and focus on Congress and its Republican majorities. They're the main characters now.

please follow a few nonprofits in your state who are in your chosen area of interest and subscribe to their action alerts. Our funding is still frozen based on an EO that was blocked by the courts and we found that when we call senators and reps to tell them that they're flat out surprised. They are mostly under the same information barrage that you are and need issues flagged

Yeah I saw the lovecraftian horrors and didn’t succumb to madness. What- no I’m not a cultist, James. For Christ’s sake. What you’re forgetting my friend is that HP Lovecraft wasn’t a flexible man. His brain simply wasn’t stretchy enough to take it all in. I however, have short term memory issues. Flexibility is the name of the game when you can’t remember if you ate lunch or not. What’s the size of the universe? Big. You knew that already, James. Come on now. You don’t need to witness the terrifying ocean at the base of the entirety of reality itself to know that. Pass the brandy.

the baby started singing a song and I was like "where did you learn that song" and my sister was like "oh I'll send you the link" and I must say it is going on a playlist that just has it on it. one of them one song playlists

I have to post the lyrics. to the tune of "if you're happy and you know it clap your hands":

worrying has never changed a thing

and so all that I can do is try to bring

a sense of steady calm

till I know what’s going on

cause worrying has never changed a thing.

all that I can do is trust and wait

and try my best to gather information

I can try to be prepared

and I can do it scared

but worrying has never changed a thing.

all that I control is myself

no I cannot control anybody else

so I'll do what I can do

then wait and see what’s true

cause worrying has never changed a thing!